For some reason today my laptop decided to pack up and wouldnt boot telling me a file was missing. tried the restore which when it eventually was done (1hr later) just wouldnt load either.

Since 8pm i have deleted the whole of the hard drive and formatted it and reinstalled the restore disk that came with it but its now not reconising any of the drives and goes off in a spaz and tries rebooting again. its an advent 7006 laptop and any help would be appreciated as it looks like the new laptop i was getting next summer might be before xmas.

cheers

You getting any beeps or error codes when you start the system?

Take it you dont' have any USB pendrives etc in the machine when trying to boot?

no, i have formatted and partioned it and can see that i have the full capacity there but its only fat32 and the recovery disk also loads and adds stuff but when you reboot it it comes up with invalid drive.

When you format do you do a format or quick format?

Might be worth trying to rewrite the MBR too, although I'd have thought a clean install should do that for you too.

ok... any chance you can just write me an idiots guide on what to do so i cannot go wrong as this laptop is slowly finding itself getting closer to a sledgehammer.

Well i would try another clean install making sure you delete the partition and then when you create it again do a format not a quick format.

If that fails, I'd then suggest trying another 2.5" laptop drive as it sounds as if the one in there might be having a bit of failure. If the other drive works then it's time to get yourself a lappy drive to replace yours which should be about £40-50 tops.

Novatech SATA 120GB 2.5" High Speed Notebook Hard Drive : nov-nbhs12

i dont know anything about dos and am using the pc utilities disk that was accidently left in the laptop when it was sent away a few years ago to do it all with. its telling me it has a win 95 o/s but even after installing the advent xp recovery disc im still not getting any further.

what are the dos commands and i will try it all in dos |(if you tell me how to get into that to as it wont allow me to do anything apart from f2)

well you would use "fdisk" but you must be very careful with that as you could delete everything and render it unusable so i don't recommend it if you don't know what you are doing.

I suggest a "format c: /u" where c: is the drive letter you are going to be installing to.

What is F2 and what is this util you talk of, I'm not familiar with it tbh.

What OS is it, 95 or XP?

Are you trying to use XP recovery discs for another machine to get this one going as that might not work due to the parts in the laptop and drivers etc

f2 gets you into start up configuration on mine.

the o/s should be xp home on it.

right i can see all the files on the hard drive, but still says invalid drive when you boot up?

Can you take the HD out and boot it without is connected. It should be happy enough for a little while then stop.

Just to check it is the HD.

If you can identify the manufacturer of the hard disk (won't be Advent) go to their website and download the tools they have. You'll probably get a bootable CD image file (ISO).

Connect up the HD, set the laptop to boot from CD and run the tool. It should identify any problems with the drive. They'll also perform fast formatting and make partitioning easier.

did as you said and it acted as you said. once the hard drive was back in it fired off again into how it should do and briefly flashed up windows 95 loading screen before stopping on windows 95 dos with a c prompt. Used a windows 95 recovery/utilities disc last night which was kindly left in the cd drive of this laptop after it was sent off for repair a few years ago.

Tested the harddrive with all the tests on it and it passed. formatted it, partitioned it and named it too. However it doesnt like the xp recovery disk that comes with the laptop even through it puts the files onto the harddive, i suspect the disk must be looking for the rest of the install on the harddrive which it wont be.

Ordered a windows xp disc yesterday, should have it by friday and will try this and see if it solves it, if it does it only be me vagcom pc as ive now ordered a new laptop as this is now over 5 years old.

If you have any other ideas feel free to suggest them.