Tried to install ME over XP (i am an idiot)

Hi all,

Any help appreciated,

Background: We have 2 laptops in the house, both Dell 2500. One with ME(personal laptop), one with XP (work laptop). Anyway as we are giving the older ME laptop away i replaced the hard drive and added some ram.

I then installed the XP operating system onto the older machine by mistake (originally as i couldnt find the ME CD), it did not ask me for a product key until you go online and then it shuts you down (find out the hard way).

I then tried to re-install ME over the XP by booting from the correct CD.

This then failed and it cannot now load from CD (as it says unable to install ME) and without the CD it says "operating system not found".

Yes i am a complete idiot but does anyoine know how i can actually boot the thing?

Cheers

Sacman.

 

Thanks, i will try that now.

Cheers

Sac.

 

It wont recognise the CD when i start it up?


any ideas?

 

Perhaps it is bypassing your cdrom. Go into your bios and make your cdrom the first boot device. When it does access your cdrom, then it will basically say" Press any key to boot to the cd...", so then press a key.

 

How do you go into the BIOS? F2 set up?


Thanks,.

 

Right ok, i can get it to run the CD but the advice below seems to conflict?

I have Inserted the XP CD but how do i format and which do i need? NTFS or FATS32?

Its now at the welcome to setup screen?

Arrrggh.

 

FAT32

Since ME can't understand NTFS.

Just a quick question, do you have a floppy drive for this computer?

 

Yes there is a floppy and CD,

Just tried the FDisk from the bootdisk, managed to delete the primary partition and created a new one.

restarted, boot from CD and then when trying to format it says "error detected while formatting your primary hard disk partition "

Back in Fdisk the primary dos partition is set as FAT32 under system header. 100% usage.

How do i now format this?

The help is really appreciated and i am actually finding this really interesting!

 

The fdisk guidance says you need to run "extract ebd.cab format.com" to extract to the boot disk,

cant seem to get this to work,;
C: it says "error cannot open file: ebd.com
A: it says "write protect error"

At wits end.

Sacman.

 

Cheers MA,

totally agree with you! -

I have actually reverted to your original suggestion! - i am at the set up screen using XP disk and i have 2 alternatives;

- format using NTFS (quick) or;
- format using NTFS.

how do i get it to format in FAT32?

Thanks,

Sac