My friend handed me his laptop today claiming it was dead and that it would not start and work. i turned it on and found that it was in the middle of a fresh windows installation of windows xp home sp 3. i called him and asked what he had done and he said he had tried to wipe the computer as he has done before only the power went out in the middle of the installation and now it wont finish. i have his copy of the install disc, and have tried to finish the install but it continues to look for a file by the name of "amsm". i have tried to boot straigh from cd using the boot menu but it only brings me back to the half finished install screen which is stuck at 39 minutes remaining. i have tried using a retail version of windows xp sp 3 from my work and still was unable to get it to boot from disc. if someone can help me to boot it from the disc i can install it just fine, just stuck at that point. thanks for all the help.
ps, its an Acer Travel Mate 2420, looks old not sure what it has for specs other then a gig of Ram.
1. Make sure CD is set as the first boot device.
2. When it starts to boot there will be a count-down where you have to hit a key to boot from CD, if you don't hit a button it will continue to boot from the hard drive (which is a corrupted installation now).
3. Select a new installation formatting the hard drive and it should work as long as you can keep the power on this time.
1. Make sure CD is set as the first boot device.
2. When it starts to boot there will be a count-down where you have to hit a key to boot from CD, if you don't hit a button it will continue to boot from the hard drive (which is a corrupted installation now).
3. Select a new installation formatting the hard drive and it should work as long as you can keep the power on this time.
If you give this a go and it keeps jumping to the pervious install you may have to use another disc(eg linux live CD) to format the hard drive and start again.
- Let us know how it goes.
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