[thekenman]

Dell laptop cpia freezes at the login page.
It had windows 98 just upgraded to XP pro.
Was working fine till I went to transfer my files from desktop to laptop.
Using the transfer wizard went though steps, desktop went into collecting files this
took about 3hrs. Laptop was hooked up waiting. When desktop finished collecting
it was in looking for computer mode for another 3hrs. all this time laptop was in waiting for files to transfer mode. I cancelled the desktop and tried to cancel the laptop it would not cancel had to unplug power and pull battery to shutdown. Laptop will not not move pass login screen when booting up. I tried all the safe modes on start up. Mouse is stuck in middle of screen only keys that work are Fn/f8 or Fn/end and the shutdown button.
Tried to boot from start up disk will not go. took dvd drive out & unhooked diskette drive still a no go
Help Please

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from what you say, it sounds like a hardway problem... you were giving it a real stress test, so something could have fried, but let's try...

If it gets to the login screen of XP, you should be able to get to the bios setup... when you turn it on, wait for the beep (if it beeps, or just before it starts to load windows) and hit the Del or F1 key (check your manual for how to get to the bios setup screen). Once there, you can set it to boot from the floppy. So, try that first, and see if you can boot up with a windows 9x bootup disk. If so, and it seems to do OK (keyboard works, etc... you probably converted the hard drive to ntfs so it won't show up as a valid disk using the dos bootup disk), then put the xp install disk in the cd/dvd player, and shut down (windows xp won't install from DOS). Then, restart the computer, hit the key to go to the bios setup again, and this time, choose the cd/dvd as the bootup device, save, shut down, remove the floppy, and restart with the xp disk in the drive... if it allows you to get that far, choose Repair from the options... hopefully, that will get to the bottom of the problem

[Tim Wellman]

from what you say, it sounds like a hardway problem... you were giving it a real stress test, so something could have fried, but let's try...

If it gets to the login screen of XP, you should be able to get to the bios setup... when you turn it on, wait for the beep (if it beeps, or just before it starts to load windows) and hit the Del or F1 key (check your manual for how to get to the bios setup screen). Once there, you can set it to boot from the floppy. So, try that first, and see if you can boot up with a windows 9x bootup disk. If so, and it seems to do OK (keyboard works, etc... you probably converted the hard drive to ntfs so it won't show up as a valid disk using the dos bootup disk), then put the xp install disk in the cd/dvd player, and shut down (windows xp won't install from DOS). Then, restart the computer, hit the key to go to the bios setup again, and this time, choose the cd/dvd as the bootup device, save, shut down, remove the floppy, and restart with the xp disk in the drive... if it allows you to get that far, choose Repair from the options... hopefully, that will get to the bottom of the problem

[thekenman]

T HANKS VERY MUCH
I just rebooted from the dvd drive with the xp disk and it worked fine.
Re installed no problems Have no idea what happened. Lost all info but its
on my desktop maybe I,ll transfer Chunks of files at a time.

Thanks Again