My friends is having major problems with his laptop. A while ago he got a virus and decided to reinstall Windows XP pro. Every time he goes to reinstall he'll get a blue screen of death before it ask him if he wants to reinstall or fix the current windows. But the weird thing is that it will let him boot in safe mode. Last night I had him install ubuntu just so it would format the HDD. He then tried to reinstall windows again, only to find he still gets a BSOD. What's his problem?
Sounds like the xp install disc is the problem. If he has formatted the HD and it still does it then it's the disc. First thing to do is to try cleaning it. Failing that borrow a copy off some one.
you had another xp disc and didn't try it... when.will.people.learn.how.to.use.a.computer lol im joking of course but read it in sync with the little blue guy bashing his head up against a wall awesome
Might be the had disc if it's dodgy it'll let you format and then when you try to put something on it, it'll throw up the BSOD
I was reinstalling xp the other day. it kept blue screening after the initial driver load up too, but I sorted it. I reckon it could be some kind of hard drive controller issue because the computer boots from the hard drive, safe mode or not, so the drive controller device driver may be already installed on the original install but since the xp install CD only has a limitted set of drivers included it may not recognise the hard drive if your drive controller is not a supported generic type. I had 2 options, the first was check the bios and turn off any kind of fancy raid options to give the windows device drivers the best chance of recognising the drive. The second is try and find out which hard drive controller hardware is in the pc, download the specific driver, when xp install boots it will prompt you to hit F6 (i keep tapping it until the message goes away, its sometimes a bit temperamental), after it loads the standard drivers it should prompt you to install extra drive controller drivers, note you will need a floppy drive to do this with XP (or you may be able to do it with a usb stick but have never tried). If you can tell me what model laptop it is I could have a quick look?
I have a feeling if you attempt an XP install with AHCI enabled in the BIOS but no drivers provided to XP then it will blue screen. You will need to supply a floppy disk with drivers (after pressing F6) or slipstream the install to include the drivers for XP (more involved but there are plenty of guides around). That may be the problem.
Everyone here was wrong, he installed Ubuntu then tried to install XP again and yet another BSOD. He said he changed some stuff in BIOS and everything installed correctly without using my XP disc
