Be Excellent To Each Other

At the minute it doesn't work. Resets in the bootup process. Think there's much chance of getting it to work?

Also whilst I'm at it, I've been given a dead laptop. It has several keys missing and refuses to show any sign of booting up. No bios screen or anything, though it does show power.. Is it at all likely it's fixable?

Don't know if this helps but I have a old internal HD converted into an external drive with a £20 case. Win7 is on the new internal HD but I can boot up vista (if I wanted) from the external, kind of like master slave running off USB. I have no idea why it works but I didn't have to reinstall anything so I don't care.

If I'm understanding this correctly then I'd say that even if you could get it to work it's probably a recipe for an unstable, unreliable mess.

Never tried this with Vista, but certainly with XP you could boot off the Windows CD and do a "repair" (which basically re-installs Windows over the existing installation), which should get it booting ok, but obviously a clean re-install is preferable.

The problem being that if you've changed motherboard, when you eventually get it to boot, it'll unauthenticate itself, and depending on the license, it may not be possible to re authenticate.

Hmm. Oh well never mind. The thing when phut shortly after posting this thread.

Any ideas on the laptop?



Also I've got a dodgy non booting xp install on my main PC (and another that does work), I tried a repair but it wants an admin password that I can't remember. Bah

If it's XP Pro, there's plenty of password reset / recovery tools out there.

If it's XP Home, the default password is blank, just hit Enter.

Ta Couger, I'll look into the password reset tools. Probably won't make an awful lot of difference to things in the end but we'll see.