Plzz....help me ASAP..I've this Sony P3 Notebook...has an external DVD-ROM and external Floppy Drive..the laptop did give me a blue screen on Windows start-up...saying my hard disk or the controllers are corrupted ....run chkdsk \f...remove any recently fixed hardware...-I hadn't installed any new hardware...I slaved the drive on a desktop and noticed some bad sectors...I did run SpinRite and HDD Regenerator on the drive....bad sectors gone....-**Fixed**....I installed XP on the hdd as a standalone(master) on the desktop..everything is perfect on the desktop...I can restart and dont get any blue screen....When I place it in the notebook..Windows XP starts to boot....(logo)...and from nowhere the blue screen appears again..I can't get to boot from the floppy or cdrom on the notebook as these are externals..and the BIOS is so limited that I can't get to boot from them....I tried another working hard drive..got the same blue screen...can u plz help me out of this wedlock ASAP.Thanks

The blue screen is probalby caused not by "new hardware" but rather a piece of hardware that has gone bad. Usually it is something like the memory or something easy. The only way to find out without special equipment to test the parts is to start removing things one at a time and seeing if it works after you remove each component. You also said that you setup windows XP on your desktop and then tried to put it onto your notebook. I wouldn't advise doing this as it would probably cause more harm than good. Windows XP setup, sets up various hardware components, drivers, and configurations based on the computer it was setup on. If you it up on the desktop and then try to place it on the laptop it will have wrong hardware drivers and configurations and will try to compinsate for this by installing new ones that might conflict with the ones already installed. The only time you can do this is if you are setting up similar stations and even at that you should use the sysprep tool. To boot from an external hard drive you will need a driver disk of the external drives before it can boot any type of CD or diskette. These external drives require drivers and until windows starts there are drivers being utilized. In order to use them you would have to check with the manufacture to see if they have dos drivers, that you could load on boot. Hope this information helps you out a bit. Thanks, -Mario-

you can not set up win xp on a diff system and transfer it to another system and expect it to work. Even if u switch hard drives on identical systems, it might not even work.

Installing XP on one system and moving to another is not an easy option... Unless the second syustem is identical to the first it usually won't work. However a repair installaton is the usual route that overcomes this problem. So... "If" you could access the XP-CD during boot-up... (i.e. a CD boot is an option) you could try a repair installation of the XP installation made to this drive when the drive was in the desktop PC... If that is not an option, then perhaps copy the i386 from the CD to the hardrive (put drive in that other PC to do this, and then re-install drive to the P3-Sony) and run setup from the drive direct. I'm thinking the drive will have to be fat32 and bootable to a dos prompt to do this? If this latter muse is correct then it means a reformat of the drive to fat32 and then a " sys c: " (no " ") from a '98 bootdisk) to make it bootable to a c: prompt. If going this route, then partition drive to have both Primary an Extended partition. Make Extended partition at least large enough to accomodate the i386, and copy the i386 there; and that's where you run XP set up from. By having the i386 in the Extended partition means it's there in future if need to re-install again to Primary. You can make the Extended larger (I would) so as to save data etc there too. Make Primary 5Gig-10Gig (usually more than enought for most situations; balance of drive Extended? If you want ntfs for the drive start off with fat32 and convert it to ntfs later - once everything is working OK again. Your initial problem suggests a RAM problem or a failing drive (or both...). You already indicate some issues with the drive - so I'd be inclinded to replace it regardless.