No OS disk will run!!! Help

Captain Kirk

Captain Kirk

Member
Hey cybertechs,

At first, it was the DVD drive, which became "disabled". I thought maybe my OS disks were scratched:confused:

ALL of my OS disks won't run!!!!!!!!!:mad:

They will not boot. They boot Into a partial boot or almost boot, but a full install cannot be completed, let alone barely even started!!!:eek:

I do not understand what is going on:(
I have replaced the DVD drive.
 
What computer is this? Is this a SATA or IDE drive? If its a IDE drive, are there two drives on the same cable. If so is one set as master and one as slave?
 
StrangleHold,
Hello there. Glad to meet you!
Level 23, holy smoke man!! 16,000 post -- my God, this is THE most posts that I have ever seen that someone has had in a computer forum. My Gosh, you are a champion. You are a living legend dude.

Anyways, back to reality on Earth:
I have a Laptop that uses an IDE hard drive. So there are only two types of hard drives, SATA and IDE? Because I almost got stuck with a SATA hd, and found out that I would have had to carry around a bunch of cords and an adapter just to use it!!! Don't think I want to do that!

I do miss having a Desktop -- they are so much more "computer friendly". My last Desktop got fried in a power surge. A 2.4 Gig. OUCH!!!!
So no, no IDE cable, two to a cable, OR the whole MASTER/SLAVE issue and setting the pins to the correct position and all that jazz.

Here's what happened:

I put all of my OS disk in a stack. This stack got jostled around alot in the whole month long struggle for OS installation. I think they got scratched. This is my only conjecture.

As you know my DVD Drive has been disabled, and does not detect CDs. I got a new DVD drive. I seated it in the Compaq. Now I can "see" disks when I put them in the drive!!!

However, I seem to be having a whole noah's arc boat load of problems here, one problem after another, because, even though my previous DVD Drive went out and was replaced, it seems that now ALL of my OS disks do not work now. And when I say ALL, I mean ALL. And how do you know this, you ask? Because I have double tested ALL of them to make sure that it was not just a fluke or the probability of pure chance or bad luck.

Here are all of the OS disks that I have tested. When I refer to a number beside an OS CD, this indicates that I have another duplicate of this disk. #3 means that I have 3 disks of this same CD. The number after the OS is the number of times that I have tested the OS by rebooting/turning off.

TESTED:

Puppy 8 Boots [Partial]
Knoppex #1 7 Boots [Almost]
Knoppex #2 8 Boots
Fedora 7 Boots [Partial]
XP sp2 #1 7 Boots [Almost]
XP sp2 #2 6 Boots
XP sp2 #3 7 Boots
XP sp2 #4 1 Boot [Almost]
Mint 6 Boots [Partial]

Captain Kirk
 
StrangleHold,
Here is a quick summary.
Lets focus on only 1 OS:

I put XP in.
It goes to the blue screen for the install process.

Here are the error messages that I get. I only get 1 error message per try.
Each time, the error message is different.

eRROR mESSAGES:

1> Error Code 4

2> Error Code 7

3> Error Code 14

4> Unexpected error line 1773

RESULT
Windows will not complete the install. Windows CANNOT "be" installed, nor ANY other OS!!!!!!!!

Captain Kirk
 
Code 4 = Damaged or Incompatible Hardware.
Code 7= Probably to do with Ntkrnlmp.exe not copying.
Code 14= Has to do with \i386\l_intel.nls not loading.
Unexpected error line 1773= could have to do with your memory.

Have you got this in the bios set as HAL or ACPI ?
 
Level 23,
Are HAL or ACPI options that you can select in the Bios?
Remember, I have a Laptop which has a VERY limited Bios.

"HAL or ACPI"
What are these or how do I select them?
Do I just look to "see" how it is configured and don't select anything?
I know not familiar with this process...

I went to the Bios and looked through ALL of the options and did not see anything that said that said "HAL or ACPI".
I'm not quite sure if going to my Bios helped my system, or because of the Recovery CD's that did not install, but now I get the Plop install that I had on the hd instead of the error message and a black screen.

NOTE: I could not figure out how to properly "configure" the Plop program and so my computer is still not able to boot with a USB [old Bios]. The Plop program supercedes all others. The option to boot to the hd in the Plop menu returns an error.

Inspired that you had helped me gain ground on tackling this project, I put in both of my recovery CD's, one at a time. One failed; one boot attempt. The second returned a black screen indicating that I should insert the Windows disk to fix an error in the Windows system. So I put XP into the drive, and was a little worried when the install process started.

I do not want to reinstall Windows, as it might ruin the saved data on the hd. The last thing that happened to the hd was that the partition was deleted [C#1 Laptop hd], however it is now being run in the C#2 Laptop, and so I wanted to recover the partition before doing ANYTHING to it at all.

You know what it says when a partition has been deleted: Unallocated space, right?

By the way if it IS the memory, I do have 2 RAM cards, so if one went out, the other one would be there, which still gives me 256 MB of RAM with the one card. And it is pretty improbable for "both" sticks to go out at the SAME time. And my other computer is running just fine with 256 MB's of RAM and doesn't have any problems at all...

QUESTION
If both of them [RAM Sticks] did go out, what would happen [0 MB RAM]? How would my computer respond?

Captain Kirk
 
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