[robert83]

I am working on a laptop for a friend. Here the only specs I can come up with

Sony Vaio
60gig HD
512 RAM
Windows XP Home SP1

That all I have becaue the comuter is crashed and she doesn't know anything else. Here's the story: It's a compter that she's giving away, and all we want to accomplish is getting XP loaded on for the person she's giving it to. The computer was originally stuck in a boot loop. I took the HD out and put it in another laptop and ran an XP setup disk. Got XP running and put the HD back into the sony. It boots up and says "Operating System not Detected." I tired to run the XP setup disk and it shows one partition of only about 7500 mb. I tried to load XP and it says it's unsuitable for XP setup. I tried to run chkdsk /r and c: and it said "invalid drive or no disk in drive." The BIOS show the Primary Master as empty, I don't know if that has any impact. What can I do? I don't have any data that I'm trying to preserve, so reformating or anything like that is just fine.

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XP and win2K don't like it when you change motherboards and chipsets, so loading the OS first was not such a good idea. You might want to put the drive back in the other machine as a slave and refomat it, then place it in the first machine as master (or cable select) and install the OS on it. If need be you can temporarly connect a cd-rom to the machine.

[Tyger]

XP and win2K don't like it when you change motherboards and chipsets, so loading the OS first was not such a good idea. You might want to put the drive back in the other machine as a slave and refomat it, then place it in the first machine as master (or cable select) and install the OS on it. If need be you can temporarly connect a cd-rom to the machine.

[robert83]

Ok, so I tried to reformat the drive in my other laptop. It gave me the same error "The specified drive is invalid, or there is no disk in drive" I tried to run chkdsk, same thing. so I decided to see if it would detect the HD if I started loading XP. It showed a partition of about 28000 MB. I didn't actually load XP. So why can't I format or chkdsk? Is there a possiblilty that the physicall drive is messed up? How could I diagnose that?

[robert83]

Is anyone still looking into this for me?