Hello friends,

I just wanted to ask you all a very simple question. Well my friends lap top has a problem with the bios... It is either corrupted or infected... You cannot change the boot priority whatsoever. (Please do not make any suggestions on changing the boot priority as we have given up and tried them all)

Anyways his hard drive will not boot because it has a virus on it which ruined the o/s. You cannot install win xp off the cd because you cannot change the boot priority in the bios. Yet when you remove the hard drive from the lap top the bios does allow the win xp cd to run. Which is of no use since you cannot install win xp with the hard drive out. (Yes we even tried attaching the drive when the xp cd loads that way)

His computer now either goes in the garbage, or gets sold for parts! We are trying to avoid that by installing win xp on the hard drive. I just have one simple question which I would like answered by as many people as possible before we try it.


If we take the hard drive to a pc shop and have the drive wiped (ie: everything wiped by the win xp installing cd without going to the next step and installing it)... Can we than take the hard drive after it's wiped and put it back it his lap top and install win xp off the cd? Meaning... Will the win xp cd load so it can setup xp since there would be nothing on the hard drive?

We're hoping this is the only way we can save his lap top. We just don't know if we try this out, if the win xp cd will load since the bios would see that there is nothing on the drive and automatically go to the next boot priority which would be the xp cd.

Please let us know asap as there is a pc tech that will charge my friend a good price to wipe the drive using a seperate lap top he has at the shop. He'll use the seprate one to just wipe it and hand it back to us.


Note: Please do not ask me any questions about why the bios is doing this or how we can flash the bios, etc. We have tried everything this is the only method we can think of. This is the only question we want anwsered. By the way we know his lap top is still good since you can load Ubuntu Live dvd or Suse Live dvd and it works. The problem is just the bios. But all we want is that question answered about wiping the drive and putting it back in his lap top in order to install xp.


Thank You

what does the laptop maker suggest on their site, I get the feeling that whatever you do, as soon as there is a problem you will be back to square-one if the BIOS is wonkey whereas the maker might have an answer for you

the problem with trying to install xp onto a harddirve outside you laptop is the XP is very much married to the motherboard that it installs on, so for example if you had exactly the same type motherboard and specs then yes is not going to bulk at being placed from one computer to another whereas if it detects the difference, it will refuse to function becasue Windows Product Activation checks the following ten things:
Some score more than others. If you deviate too far from what you registered (i.e. you completely rebuilt your computer from scratch) you will need to phone MS and enter a 50 digit key.
The WPA system checks ten categories of hardware:

Display Adapter
SCSI Adapter
IDE Adapter (effectively the motherboard)
Network Adapter (NIC) and its MAC Address
RAM Amount Range (i.e., 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc.)
Processor Type
Processor Serial Number
Hard Drive Device
Hard Drive Volume Serial Number (VSN)
CD-ROM / CD-RW / DVD-ROM

I'm with "flea"......if the bios is bad ...not much will work..with that said ...you can wipe the drive by formatting it and then install windows ....you should get ALL the drivers from the manufacture first and have them handy...

I would try to set the bios to the defaults if it was me...