Help me fix a Horlicks I made!

Parted Magic live cd


That has memtest on it too in the boot menu

Sounds like borked ram/hard drive to me
 
Snograt said:
Does make you wonder how much warranty would be left on a laptop with XP installed...
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It's a nearly 1 year old machine.

DRZ said:
If this is a Dell laptop then there is a chance this is a known issue where it will bluescreen during the install of XP unless you set it into the correct BIOS mode. I'd check that before you continue chasing your tail :)
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Hi DRZ. How's things? :) It's an Asus 1001P netbook.

bledd. said:
Parted Magic live cd


That has memtest on it too in the boot menu

Sounds like borked ram/hard drive to me
Click to expand...
Thanks for another suggestion. :) When I get some time I will look at this, perhaps tomorrow when no children or teachers are in.
 
Right I've had some time today to have a look at this netbook. I tried the SATA drivers on a USB pen and that didn't work. The netbook said it couldn't find any floppy drives because there aren't any. So I checked out the BIOS and changed the AHCI to IDE. The setup then progressed fine. I opted to repair Windows and got to the command prompt. I did a chkdsk which implied there were some errors, although I couldn't use the /f parameter for some reason. I used /r instead and it seemed to work. I also ran a fixboot and then restarted the netbook. Lo and behold it booted into the new XP that is from the wrong recovery disk but it proves that the machine can now boot up.

I've opened up the Computer Management tool and I can see three partitions on the machine, excluding the USB DVD drive. They are:

  • C:\ (OS_Install)
  • D:\ (Data)
  • WINRE (No drive letter assigned)

I am hoping that WINRE is the original hidden partition that I would have unlocked if I'd done the right thing to begin with and pressed F9 not forcing a Hannspree XP recovery onto an Asus netbook. :D

If I used something like System Rescue CD/Ultimate Boot CD/Parted Magic on a USB stick could I 'unpack' the contents of the WINRE partition and 'copy' them to C:\ so that I replace the Hannspree XP install with the correct Asus one?

If I can't access WINRE or its not the original Asus XP install that I hope is there I've got a fresh XP SP2 disc which I will use to install XP so that its clean and will get the drivers off Asus' support site.
 
What I'd do..

Make an XP SP3 disc, ^do what I suggested above

Before installing, run off the Parted Magic cd and remove all partitions on the hard drive.
 
bledd. said:
What I'd do..

Make an XP SP3 disc, ^do what I suggested above

Before installing, run off the Parted Magic cd and remove all partitions on the hard drive.
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OK. I've got SP3 somewhere for when I rebuild the Sixth Form laptops.

We do have another netbook exactly like this one. My boss would prefer that we keep them as true to their original setup as possible. Could I copy the hidden partition from the other netbook and copy it onto the affected netbook?
 
Yeah, but why? A fresh new clean install will be quicker than Asus's default image

Macrium reflect would do it
 
It would yes but that is what my boss wants.

Interesting development time though. Earlier on I tried to look into the WINRE partition on Parted Magic but I couldn't open it up. I just tried again and I can see the files inside. I've copied them all to a USB stick. One folder is called 'Recovery', another is called 'RecoveryCD_ISO', which sounds quite promising. I will see what I can achieve with those two folders. :) I'll also give Macrium Reflect a go. Cheers bledd. :)
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Your Boss seems like he doens't know what he's doing.
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You can be quite a wise person sometimes Burnsy. ;)

Interestingly I just put the "Configure SATA devices as" option back to AHCI from IDE and it doesn't boot up following that. It was originally set as AHCI and I got the XP install to proceed by changing it to IDE. It seems that there's something wrong with the AHCI mode. Any ideas what I can do to fix that? Not that its utterly necessary. Now that I've found the recovery files on the WINRE partition I should be able to restore the original Asus XP install but I would still like to know why the AHCI mode is screwed up.
 
You have to install and activate AHCI drivers in Windows before switching AHCI back on in the BIOS. This can mean installing the mobo and controller chipset drivers from the vendor site, wouldn't come on the (Windows) OS disk.

Though it shouldn't make any odds at all to your ability to access drives and partitions, IDE access mode and drivers ought to be perfectly fine, just potentially a little slower at some IO activities if the drive itself is pretty good (but I doubt that, only going to be a little 2.5 lowish power thing to stop it hogging the power anyway almost without question).
 
topdog@OC said:
You have to install and activate AHCI drivers in Windows before switching AHCI back on in the BIOS. This can mean installing the mobo and controller chipset drivers from the vendor site, wouldn't come on the (Windows) OS disk.
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Yeah I thought I'd have to re-install the drivers. I'll get them from the Asus support site.

topdog@OC said:
Though it shouldn't make any odds at all to your ability to access drives and partitions, IDE access mode and drivers ought to be perfectly fine, just potentially a little slower at some IO activities if the drive itself is pretty good (but I doubt that, only going to be a little 2.5 lowish power thing to stop it hogging the power anyway almost without question).
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It is a Seagate 160GB model. I did find the model number but considering the cost of the netbooks it'll be, as you say, a cheap and cheerful model.
 
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