Help with laptop problems

[cattlegrid_79]

Hi all

I have a laptop that has got to that stage where there is nothing left to do but re-format the hard drive. There's so much rubbish on it and any amount of clean up software makes no difference. It's at "that stage". I have taken everything I need to save and written it to CD and I have the original install discs for everything else.

So, the problem. Ordinarily I could boot from the CD drive to get to the Windows XP recovery console and go from there. However, the computer says that there is no bootable CD in the drive, even though there is and the BIOS lets me change the sequence of devices on bootup to CD first.

So i have the recovery disks for the laptop (provided by the manufacturer), which also will not boot directly. However, when I try and run these, I get an error message, headed 16 Bit MS-Dos Subsystem (or similar) saying that my "autoexec.nt" will not allow the running of the program.

How do I clear this thing down and start again?

 

[reality]

first off check if there's a new bios flash, get this from the mfg's site, this may help with booting. if that doesn't work, goto http://www.bootdisk.com/ and get a win98 SE or one of the w2k boot images, make a bootable floppy and this will allow you to get into the cd to reload the system. you may have to play with a few different images to get one that works

 

[DeVitaf]

I recover a lot of machines from that almost unrecoverable, crippled by malware, spyware and virus stage ...

If you can not reimage it or want to try and clean up the drive just say the word.

-Devitaf

 

[DeVitaf]

What type of laptop is it?
Model?
Can you boot to other CDs?
What operating system?