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A simple cleansweep...


taktoa
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Hi I'm new to the forum and I had a simple problem...

... that erupted into a (multi-)week long quest for the ability to use my damn computer

****NOTE: You have to read this in order to understand the question; there is no "bottom line" section of this post.****

My computer has been broken for the past week and I am FRUSTRATED. It starts out as a simple cleansweep of WinXP MCE 2005. I put in the install disc and repartition and crap. Then its time to reboot and put in the second disc and I get the lovely blue installation screen with all of its fancy gradients and whatnot. ERROR. It say some crap about the fact that it can't find "asms". I google it on my laptop (the machine I am typing on.) They say that you need to edit some registry crap. So I follow their directions and press Shift+F10 when the error appears and I get a command line. I type in regedit and it retorts something like, "You can't do this because you suck." Back to the drawing board. I try running various LiveCD linux distros so that I can repartition the hdd. Out of 10, only Damn Small Linux loads properly (of course I had to spend an our troubleshooting each broken distro before I got to DSL). But when I finally get into DSL, I CAN'T FIND THE PARTITION EDITOR! I try 9 more linux distros until I find gParted, which happens to work. I repartition the hard drive (after spending 15 minutes trying to get gParted to work) and I put in three partitions: a NTFS partition of 100Gb, an EXT3 partition of 45Gb, and a linux-swap partition of 5Gb. I figure that I could dualboot the system with Linux. So then I try popping in my WinXP disc and it doesn't load. So I figure that it might work on my external Iomega DVD-RAM drive (my internal optical drive has had a long history of being finicky). WRONG. All it said was that there was no disc in the drive. So I realize that my WinXP disc was probably messed up. So I torrent an iso of it and burn it (semilegal, considering that you pay for the serial key (which I have), not the disc). It doesn't work. It does my normal computer loading and then says "Setup is configuring your hardware" and then it displays the loading screen that happen before it. And so on and so forth. I then try Kubuntu. Nope. So I start typing a desperate cry for help.

:( :( :( :( :(

Any suggestions?

Please?

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Try this:

Find out the manufacturer of the hard drive and download their utility for carrying out a "low level" format of the drive. Assuming the drive is not damaged, this should return it to the "as new" condition.

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Does it has some kind of disk overlay like in some thinkpads?

I had a thinkpad once and couldn't install XP (or Linux) because of Ontrack HD Overlay,

I finally formatted the disc with Nuke and Boot CD , needless to say , if you use that option all your data will be erased....

btw- for these kind of things the best LiveCD would be Knoppix

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Knoppix was among the distros I tried but didn't work.

I have a desktop with 2Gb of Buffalo ValueRAM DDR2-667 RAM, a Pentium D 2.66GHz processor, a Seagate Barracuda 160Gb hard drive that is probably formatted, and a 480W PSU. I built it 3 years ago.

My RAM passed the memtest86 about a week ago, so the RAM is probably not the problem. The PSU is doing OK, but I don't know about my PATA hard drive/optical drive.

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