Re: Some anomalies after reinstallation

Jim Ludwig wrote:
Hi all,
I recently wiped my sisters computer clean (fdisk and slow format) and
reinstalled WinXP Home fresh. She has a 3 yr old Dell Dimension. She was
not able to find her Win XP or driver discs. I used my copy
of win xp, but used her product key from the label on her computer
and it activated fine. I am having two problems that are more
annoyance than anything:
First, when you reboot the computer, when still in the bios a screen
comes up that says,
"Please select operating system"
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
and there is a count down waiting for me to pick one or the other. If I
choose the first one, Windows boots normally. If I let the
countdown finish, it automatically chooses the first one and finishes
booting. If I choose the 2nd one, I get a message saying that it
couldn't start because of a disk hardware configuration problem. Couldn't
read from selected boot disk. Check boot path and hardware.
Plus some stuff about checking the documentation.
Any thoughts about this? I am wondering if she had a backup/restore
partition on the hard drive from the factory and maybe that's why she
couldn't find her discs. Even if that is the case, should my
formatting and fdisk have wiped that clean?

As you no doubt discovered by now, FDISK and Format do not rewrite the
Master Boot Record. For this, and other, reasons, the two are not
appropriate for XP installations.


.

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