laptop boot and load problems

[filmfan]

Hi

The laptop is an Acer Aspire 1353XC, XP Home, can't tell you much more about it because i can't get in to it!

A friend has an Acer Aspire 1350 laptop, it wouldn't load windows, so i decided to run the recovery disk/s, this failed after running the first system disk.

After several unsuccessful attempts i have abandoned the Acer disks and would like to reinstall windows, when i boot from the CD, i see the "Windows is inspecting your hardware configuration" for a couple of seconds and then the screen goes black accept for a flashing "cursor" in the top left of screen, have waited 20 minutes but it won't move from this screen.

I then tried from a floppy start disk, get to an A prompt ok but then it hangs on reading the windows disk.

Could the cd/dvd be playing up and not reading?

Any ideas/help would be much appreciated.

[Generator]

it could be the cd/dvd drive or the disk,,i would say its the cd/dvd drive ,,as i have just helped a lady freind of mine,,and she had the same problem it starts to inspect and then just a black screen and cursor flashing..i changed the cd/dvd drive to a new one and all ok..installed no problems..your best bet is if you can get a external cd/dvd drive and if installs,, your no the problem.. or get a new cd/dvd drive for the laptop..there not that much nowadays. also you can get a cd/dvd cleaner disk to clean the combo drive..maybe it need a clean.