I bought a used HP OmniPoint 300Mhz laptop with XP Pro installed. I want to reinstall XP Pro in order to start fresh - it had a lot of spyware, viruses, etc.

The laptop has one swapable bay and the laptop has both a floppy and CD-Rom drive.

The problem is that the laptop will not boot from the CD - so I can not start the XP install from a boot.

The BIOS is correctly set, and the boot order is CD, Floppy, HD. When I use the floppy it does boot from the floppy first, so I know BIOS is somewhat right.

The laptop does not have DOS installed so a WIN 98 boot disc doesn't help and the HD is NTFS.

Any thoughts on re-installing XP PRO on this laptop?

Thanks for your help!!

DeeMaN

Set bios boot order to floppy, insert win 98 bootdisk, say yes to cd rom support, at the "A" prompt type fdisk, say yes to large disk support. Remove non dos partition & any other. Navigate out with the escape key until flashing "restart screen appears for changes to take effect. Reboot and press f2 or delete to enter bios , reset to boot from cd rom with hard drive as second option, XP should install.HTH

Check this out

Check this out

Ham30 - your link to the MS website looked very promising and seemed to address exactly what I needed. Unfortunatley, I went thru the process and it did not work....at the end of the process the screen indicates that it can't find the CD_ROM - I ejected my floppy drive, inserted the CD-ROm hoping that it would now recognize the CD-ROM and nothing. Sooooo close!!

Any other thoughts?

DeeMan

you could try 1st boot as cd-rom and for 2nd and 3rd leave them blank.

Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

My BIOS only allows you to re-arrange the order of the devices. You can not actually remove any of the devices from the list.

Do you think it would help if I can flash my BIOS to a newer version that may include support for booting from the CD-ROM. It seems that newer laptops can indeed boot from the CD-ROM.

I tried 3 actual copies of bootable CD's (Win 98, 2k, XP) and none boot, so I know it is not the CD.

Thanks!!

DeeMan

its possible. but be careful with the flash.

Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

could try setting a 3 boot devices as cd-rom to see if it forces the cd-rom to boot

Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

Thanks for everyones input. So far no luck!! I updated the BIOS hoping that would work - and still nothing.

The BIOS forces you to use all three sources (CD/Floppy/HDD) and only allows you to change the order i.e. I can not delete or make all choices CD-ROM.

I also learned that you can press escape during the install to select the boot order, and....of course even thougth I re-selected CD-ROM it skips by it.

What is your opinion of this:
The Laptop has both a floppy drive and a CD/DVD drive. I am 90% sure the CD/DVD drive was purchased used since the laptop came out around 1999 and most likely did not have DVD drives as options. Is this perhaps a factor?

Thanks for any other advice!!

DeeMan

what model is your laptop

Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

http://www.computing.net/howto/advanced/laptopinstall/

Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

I have a similar problem with an HP omnibook xp1000s where I deleted XP home partition (C:) using PartitionMagic in order to re-install from scratch. When I loaded the XP bootable installation cd, I got the message "couldn't find NTLDR". Before going through the PartitionMagic process, I could boot from CD without a hitch.

I then restored an earlier XP version using DriveImage from diskettes. I had no trouble booting into that restored installation from hard disk. Using PartitionMagic I noticed that the first three zones on the hard disk, from left to right, were as follows :

Empty Space of 7.8MB
Type 84 zone (hidden) occupying 47.1MB
Partition C of my restored XP

Should something be going into that empty space? Should I use FixMBR or will that destroy the whole boot setup?

I would recommend putting cd-rom drivers on your hard drive. You can then boot to the hard drive with the cdrom installed and run setup or winnt.exe from the CD.

Or, if you have another computer to help out, put the files on it's hard drive, share them to a network, then use the floppy drive to boot to DOS with a small network client. MAP a drive to source files and run winnt.exe.