XP Home Reinstall

This guy is running XP Home (same guy different machine for those viewing both posts)
he brought laptop to me and could not boot up yesterday
I tried everything to get in.

Did a directory check in command line and found NO folders except Windows (wanted to copy his documents/settings onto my flash drive which WAS registering and recognized as a drive - but his son had attempted to reinistall OS the day before and probably wiped everything out)

at first it was saying that the ntoskrnl.exe file was corrupt
so I copied it from the XP CD to the c:\windows\system32 folder and rebooted
then it was asking for the ntkrnlpa.exe file
well that file was not on the CD anywhere

so he decided to just reload the OS
I tried many times
2 options of quick install and 2 options of wiping out HD and then reinistalling.

To no avail
all 4 times it never got past the evaluating your system bar - stayed at 0%

so I brought it home
tried FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, FIX Everything - no change

tried to FDISK the HD but it was not an option in either c:\ or c:\windows
so d/l a tool (from my pc) called wc_clean and burned it to CD to run from his laptop

I saw it in the command line, but when I typed it in the path exactly as the command line (dir) displayed it, it said there was no such file.

So I changed the drive letter a, b, c, d, e, f to see if that might be registering as something different than it was shown (as it did with my flash drive earlier) but it kept telling me there was no such file

finally went to bed last night trying to do an install with the reformat option and woke up this morning at the 100% mark...

VOILA !!!!

Because there's no shutdown or NEXT instructions from here I wanted to post what I'm seeing and let someone tell me if I need to shutdown and boot back up with Install CD in drive and now let it install XP
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please wait while Setup formats the partition

c: partition1 [ new (raw) ] 19069MB (19069 MB Free)

on 19078 MB Disk 0 @ ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

Setup is formatting
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now it's formatted 100% (overnight)
Do I shut down and reboot with Install CD in Drive?
if not.... what should I do?

 

Just try rebooting with the CD in the drive and it should give the Windows setup screen.

 

When I did that it did not boot back up and continue to load.
Instead It just went right back into reformatting the hard drive options.
Started all over.

 

Follow directions,screen shots included.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp

 

Because you left the CD in the drive, and as it's set in the Bios to boot from CD, it will just keep going around in circles.

After Windows has installed, you either need to remove the CD, or select "Boot from Hard Drive".