Problem XP laptop won't load, reboots repeatedly

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Thats why I linked to the cable I did, it can handle both PATA and SATA drives so you'll be able to use it whatever buggered drive you get handed

 

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Yes would come in handy I'm sure, could do with finding something local for tonight though, I take it that maplin one won't do, maybe I'll get the cable for now n then look into getting the one in your link for future use.

 

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=48965

Maplin do do an all in one cable (see above) but its got a fairly high premium on it.

 

Maplins have a couple excellent caddys which i have used on numerous occasions to save data

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?criteria=docking%20station&source=15

 

Maplins seem to all be SATA caddies, I brought the ide to laptop ide cable for £5.99 and brought an external hard drive from currys, decided to format it to NTFS though which was a mistake as its looking like about a 10:30 finish on the format alone.

 

yes it does have quite a price tag lol, I saw it in the shop too. I think i'll probably end up getting that one in your link at some point, seems a reasonable price for one that will do them all, whther I'll get to needing it again or not who knows but its always useful to have on standby isnt it.

 

Sorry for the delay on this folks, i've been a busy boy.
Thanks for your assistance so far everybody.
The laptop is now booting into windows (quite slowly I might add, but only 512Mb RAM)

To me it seems that some of the hard drive is damaged, not sure if this is the cause of the fault or whether something caused this.
Windows Error check on the drive with it in the laptop says it needs to run at start up due to necessary windows files, when it runs at start up it checks the file system and says its NTFS and then says it cannot open the volume for checking.
Booting the laptop from a disc with the Western Digital drive checker on it runs the full scan for a while then shows an error message saying there are too many bad sectors and terminates the test, this is the same with chkdsk.

If i plug the hard drive into my PC and do the WD or chkdsk on it I get the same errors, If I run error checking on it it gets to halfway through phase 4 and then stops moving.

Is it likely that this hard drive is on its way out? If so how do we stand about it being an OE version of windows installed?
would something like norton ghost allow me to clone the hard drive to transfer to a new one and not affect the windows?

Also something else that I have noticed that I havent seen before is the task manager shows CPU usage at times of between 30-60% while in the process list everything is low or 0 (with all users processes box ticked) and the system idle process is in the 90-95% region, thought that was odd, only thing I could think was maybe the CPU using the page file due to the low RAM but not sure if this shows or not.

 

Yep that hard drive is about ready to give up the ghost.. copy your data off it, buy a new one and install Windows again. the fact that Windows is an is OEM version, shouldn't matter too much, hard drives fail quiet often. Worst case scenario is you might have to ring Microsoft and go through a few hoops and a lot of numbers but it's not that bad really, just tell them it's the same computer as always just a new hard drive and they will give you a sequence of numbers to activate it.

As for the CPU problem, that should be fixed with a clean install of the operating system. It sounds like malware to me

 

Thought it might be terminal, how would I go about installing windows without a windows disc? The age old no disc supplied. That said the laptop is 4 years old so might be worth her while opting for a new one, althogh I would rather fix it for the experience

 

Well if the laptop has the product key stuck to it, which it should, you just need to find the right media, which can be a pain but where, there's a will.

Otherwise, why not install Ubuntu?

 

Yes the product key sticker is still intact, actually thats quite a miracle on a 4 year old laptop isnt it? lol

So can any windows xp home disc be used to do the install then you just enter your product key, or is the product key thats required linked with the disc?

i.e if i knew somebody who had a full xp home disc, could I use that to install to a formatted hard drive and then just use the product key from the laptop?

 

In my experiance, i have found the product key is linked to a specific range of OS disk. For example, yours *could be*, given that it's 4 years old, the OEM version of XP home, with SP1.

 

Oh right so theres not a specific 'this key for this disc', is more this batch of discs for this batch of keys, which would still make it difficult i'd imagine.

Would the norton ghost approach not work then?

 

The laptop is an Evesham 8050QDA, which I think is also supplied by MiTAC.

I have just found this but I think its only drivers

But they also have this I wonder if this could be used to load XP and then contact MS to obtain a relevant key?

 

Thats not the reply that was in the auto response email lol

Yeah the laptop has the key on it still, think thats a miracle in itself.

Also on a slightly different note, would that xp disc be able to be used to access recovery console etc?
Ive just been fixing my mates desktop which needed the boot files rebuilding but everything i found as possible solutions said to use the xp disc, which was something I didnt have so i have had to do a system recovery on it.

 

Yeah I thought it was a random site, just noticed they used to work for evesham lol, my mate doesn't have an xp disc either, I dont actually know anybody that does. That might be a useful purchase then.

So is it likely that if I installed a copy of Xp then contacted microsoft with the old key they would give me a new key or would they demand an obscene amount of cash?