Hello.

I want to cry. My 2/3 year old Packard Bell igo Laptop is acting up.

It won't load windows. Instead a cursor blinks in the top corner of the screen. When I try to use recovery disks, the thing will turn itself off - generally at the very last stages of swapping discs in and out.

Can someone help?

Please!!!

Tom

Do you know how to get into the bios Tommy?
If so look under the section Auto detect drives and see what it says.
What do you mean by swapping disks in and out?

I enter the BIOS setup by entering F2 - there doesn't seem to be a section named auto detect drives. There's a boot order and that lists drives. They're all selected.

Swapping discs in and out - I've got six discs to install windows recovery console - it's during that installation that it turns off.

Thanks for your response!!!

Tom



Tom
[/quote]
Do you know how to get into the bios Tommy?
If so look under the section Auto detect drives and see what it says.
What do you mean by swapping disks in and out?
[/quote]

[quote name='tommycm' date='Oct 19 2005, 05:51 PM' post='181211']
I enter the BIOS setup by entering F2 - there doesn't seem to be a section named auto detect drives. There's a boot order and that lists drives. They're all selected.

Swapping discs in and out - I've got six discs to install windows recovery console - it's during that installation that it turns off.

Thanks for your response!!!

Tom



A boot order or sequence will only indicate the how the bios looks for an Operating System Tommy, ie;

A
Cdrom
Hard Drive

Do you have the XP cd?

Right, understood. I don't have an XP disck - but I do have three 'CD Masters'. I assume XP is on these. The CDROM drive won't open now, though!

What do you mean by the CD Masters?

I got three Master CDs that I used to install Windows and the bundled software intially.

These sound like a;
Recovery/re-installation disk
System Driver disk
Application Disk

Can you tell me what is written on each of these disks Tommy?

They simply say Master 1, Master 2 and Master 3.

I also got a Recovery boot disk - this boots Ok, goes to install Windows again and it just crashes.

Another point - might be connected - when I turn the computer with all drives empty, it says 'invalid system disk'.

Thanks for all your help!

Get into the bios Tommy and set the first boot device as cdrom then save and exit and insert the master 1 disk.
God I hope I dont have to go down the road of fdisking here.
Try that Tommy ok.

It just says invalid system disk, the bugger.

Go back into the bios Tommy and look very carefully where it says, and it will say, what fixed disks are present.
I need to know what that states.