Help needed to save a PC!

[Fuzzguitar]

Hi folks,

               I've been given an older pc and want to use it in my cab (beats unplugging mine and moving it into the spare room for each gaming session) but there's a problem.

It needs Windows installed badly-apparently the CD drive was dodgy when the last owner tried to install ME and some files were missing. Anyway, this means it won't load windows properly, I can only get past the BIOS and I get this message:

"Error loading explorer.exe. You must re-install Windows"

When I click OK it shuts down, there's nothing else I can select as an option. Without knowing heaps about PC's my instinct was to boot from a Windows XP CD and re-install but that isn't working either.

It detects the CD in the drive but won't do anything at all. I should say here I've changed the CD Rom drive to a known working one so that's not the issue I'm pretty sure.

What on earth can I do to get this working? Can I somehow wipe the hard drive and start fresh? Should I just buy a new hard drive and install XP from scratch?

Thanks in advance, I really want to get this up and running. It's only a 566Mhz but it's free and will handle the classics mostly, I really can't buy a new PC just yet.

[daeven]

Go to http://www.bootdisk.com and write a boot floppy for whatever operating system you have on CD.    I would suggest a Win 98 or 98SE boot disk(only one disk).  Win2K or XP will require 4 floppy disks. Then boot the PC from this floppy.  After it boots, you can issue the following commands:

format c: /s/q/u
R:           [replace R with whatever drive letter the CD ROM is]
setup

If you don't know DOS, good luck.  If you do, this should be a piece of cake.

[Fuzzguitar]

Cheers!

                 I will give this a go and let you know how it works soon.

[Fuzzguitar]

I downloaded and made the (six actually) disks required for Windows XP Professional Edition but didn't end up using them because I got it to boot from CD after all. Turns out my keyboard would only work in the BIOS, not even after I exited it all, and it needed to work so i could press any key to tell the PC to boot from cd. I fixed this problem by enabling DOS USB in the BIOS.

So I could then install XP as normal but some strange things happened BOTH times I tried:

Towards the end of the installation it told me something like "Windows now needs some files from the Windows XP Home Edition disc".

Because I didn't have these (it asked twice in succession during both installation attempts) I had to cancel and continue. The result of this is that Windows XP is now "sort of" installed if you know what I mean. It boots up fine but is missing some things like all games, media player, autoplay, ability to select XP buttons over classic look, won't power down properly etc etc

What is going on? Could the disc be damaged? Could it be the PC? I think it's had a hard life but all the hardware seems good...Weird thing is I used this same disc to upgrade my personal PC from ME and it worked great.

Any ideas would help greatly at this point!

[Mr. Dude]

Wow man...  I really would have to reccomend formatting your hard drive like daeven said especially with having to partally installed versions of Windows sitting on your computer.  Then starting from scratch and installing Windows.  Here is a site that can maybe help you further....http://www.computerhope.com/boot.htm

[Fuzzguitar]

Well, I now officially feel cursed! I've tried it all- booting from the 6 Win XP floppys - goes fine until it asks me to insert the cd then gets stuck forever, also tried booting from a Win ME floppy and issuing the commands above ie; format c: /s/q/u etc but no luck.

I get messages of all types telling me Windows no longer supports that command and other can't format stuff type responses, but scandisk says all is fine. It's such a pain really.

Also get messages about the FAT file system, I'm so confused now- this should be simple but nothing is working out.

When I tried installing XP from a CD (like in my earlier post) everything went well, it even let me format it until right at the end when it asks for those files from the XP Home Edition disc and wants me to look at D:/i386 or something...

Any more ideas folks?

Should I just get another HD and cut my losses?

[GroovyTuesdaY]

Have you tried running scandisk to verify if there are any errors on the hard disk?   have you tried booting to safe mode ?  It could be the hard drive or cd-rom.   I had recently repaired a guys pc and no matter what i tried to do it couldn't get the operating system to install right.
We tried changing out the memory, new hard drive, new cd-rom drive etc and nothing seemed to work and in the end we changed the motherboard and all was well again. Only thing i could figure is that the motherboard somehow got fried or something.  Sometimes, this kinda stuff can really pizz you  off. lol.

Worse case scenario, write down the error you are getting EXACTLY and then do a google search on it and see if you can find some guides for dealing with that problem. It has really helped me in the past with odd ball problems.

good luck,
gary~

[Oldskool]

I used to have a buggy XP installation and decided to format my hard drive, and re-install it.

I downloaded a 1 floppy XP boot disk. I think it may have been from bootdisk.com.

Booting from the floppy, I used fdisk to delete the primary partition.

I then booted to my Windows XP cd, and reinstalled it.

Hope that helps.....

[Nightmare03]

Goto www.downloads.com , search for and download killdisk...

Put that onto a floppy disc, goto www.bootdisc.com and download the win98 bootdisc. Insert the win98 bootdisc and turn on the comp, when its finished everything insert the floppy with killdisk on and type killdisk then follow the on screen instructions to format the harddrive (it completly rewrites the hard drive to 0's ) once thats finished you also wont have no partitions so insert that win98 bootdisc again and restart your computer, type fdisk and create a new partition ( somebody help me out here its been a while and i dont remember what number selects what ) then just install win xp pro, if you have windows 98 install that.

Just some advice,

-Nightmare