right,
heres the situation. My dad was having problems with his laptop...so decided to fdisk the HDD and start from fresh with a total reinstall of windows...
anyway... when the laptop loads up without a cd in it comes up with an NTDLR error
(xp still not installed)
when i load it up with the xp setup disk in... it says press any key to boot from cd.. so i do that... then it take a minute or so and comes up with the blue setup screen..
so i press enter to start XP setup...
then it goes to the licesnse agreement... press F8 to agree...
then.....
As soon as i press F8 it just reboots the laptop and starts over...

It has got me completly stuck...

And help will be VERY much apprecitated.

Thanks

Gary

Hi Gary,

Welcome to PCHF.

This will normally be a hardware problem of some kind. Make sure your using an original XP CD, and that the CD is not scratched and/or dirty. You can also try cleaning the CD drive itself using a lens cleaner from any hardware store or shopping centre, Dixons or Tesco for example.

Hi thanks for the reply...
i have now worked out that if i press the buttons real quick...
ie.. as soon as it says ENTER to setup then F8 to acept
if i press them as soon as it loads then it moves on.. basically i can get to the partition bit now... then try and re format the drive and it just restarts the pc at 0%
its almost like i have a few secs then next time i press a button it restarts?

Just before you reformat, you have the option to Delete your existing partition and create a new one. Can you try to do this first? This is the route that should have been taken instead of using fdisk.

Try going here and using it to make a floppy (or CD, if the case calls for it):
Darik's Boot and Nuke (Hard Drive Disk Wipe)

This should allow you to successfully and completely format your entire HDD in the event you cannot get past the formatting screen. "Quick Erase" is the only option you will need when running DBAN since the other options are mostly for people selling their computers and want their data to not be easily recoverable.