[downwardspiral4]

My mom gave me her Sony vaio laptop because ever since she got it 4 years ago she hardly ever used it and I really needed it for school. It came with Windows 2000 and I installed XP on it for her before she gave it to me. Well, it was infected with all kinds of stuff and I decided I wanted to install a fresh partition of XP. I had the XP Upgrade package. The laptop has no floppy drive and has an external cd-rom drive. Well everything was fine but I didn't like when I had to choose between the two partitions, the one that is infected and the fresh one.

I am by no means a computer expert so I am assuming what I did next was a huge mistake. (Don't get me wrong, I know a good amount of technical computer stuff, sometimes I get carried away trying to do things on my own without thinking of the consequenses, big mistake!)

Well, the two partitions were the C:/ with fat32 file system (infected) and the other one was D:/ with NTFS file system. Well, I erased the c:/ partition. So now it says that my computer has no operating sytem.

Does this mean I have to buy a new copy of a windows os (since I only have windows XP upgrade)?

Also, If I were able to find the Windows 2000 recovery disk, would that help me out?

And let's assume the cd rom won't work, is there anything I can do since I don't have a floppy drive? At first, I tried installing XP it seemed as though the cd worked up until a certain point and then it said cd not found.

Edited by downwardspiral4, 21 June 2006 - 12:04 PM.

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the problem with the way you did it is even though Windows XP was on the second partition, the boot partition "c" had files needed to point to that

First try a repair install shown here
http://www.geekstogo...ws-XP-t138.html

I cannot recall if the repair process is clever enough to find a windows install on a second partition after you wiped the first....I think it will...you should see it in the third image

If that fails, do you have any kind of windows cd at all? A windows upgrade will install a clean copy of windows but during setup it will pause and ask you for proof of an earlier version---you do not need to install the earlier version first, just drop the cd in , and windows setup will check it and then prompt you to reinsert windows xp cd and it will finish

[gerryf]

the problem with the way you did it is even though Windows XP was on the second partition, the boot partition "c" had files needed to point to that

First try a repair install shown here
http://www.geekstogo...ws-XP-t138.html

I cannot recall if the repair process is clever enough to find a windows install on a second partition after you wiped the first....I think it will...you should see it in the third image

If that fails, do you have any kind of windows cd at all? A windows upgrade will install a clean copy of windows but during setup it will pause and ask you for proof of an earlier version---you do not need to install the earlier version first, just drop the cd in , and windows setup will check it and then prompt you to reinsert windows xp cd and it will finish

[dsenette]

with the upgrade version of xp..you can do a full format reinstall..you just have to have your 2000 disk to prove you had another OS installed previously...if this is a system recovery disk (the one for 2000) then there's a pretty good chance taht it won't be accepted as proof.. though it m ight....your cheapest option would be to use the 2000 recovery disk to restore the pc to it's original state...and then to preform the upgrade with the xp disk...

the quickest option would be to buy a full version copy of xp and format the drive with it

[downwardspiral4]

Thanks guys for the help. I was hoping I didnt have to buy a new cd even though i kinda figured thats all i could really do. the computer did come with the windows 2000 cd but my mom cant find it. im gonna buy a cheap older os version so that i dont fork over the xp price that i really dont have money for, and then ill just upgrade from there.