Endless Setup Loop: Installing Professional Over Home Edition

[sirenetta1]

Please help!

My Dad decided to install Windows XP Professional over his XP Home Edition. Everything was fine until the setup reached the section where it installs devices. It begins installing, stops, and the computer restarts back to setup. The entire process occurs again, and again, and again. The setup does not continue past the "Install Devices" section.

No matter what we try to do, from booting it from a floppy or the CD, or even running it in safe mode, it will pop up the Windows XP Professional logo and then promptly return to the setup screen.

My Dad did not make a copy of his hard drive, and I'm very concerned about that because we have very important documents on there. We cannot reformat the hard drive and start over because of this. When we began the installation process, we chose the installation to be an update, not to delete everything.

What can we do??! Any advice is very appreciated!

[snowmonkey]

Try this (it may sound unusual to some people but give it a try), go to this site: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download the Windows 98 SE boot disk, and boot your system with that disk, on the command prompt type in "fdisk /MBR" press enter and remove the disk and reboot.

Let us know how it goes.


cheers

[sirenetta1]

Snowmonkey,

Thank you for your quick response, but luckily we were able to fix the setup problem without using a boot disk!!

For those reading this post with the same problem, what we did was unplug most devices from the back of the computer (printers, scanner, usb devices). Then we went to the BIOS setting and deactivated all on-motherboard hardware, such as on-board sound card, graphics card, usb devices, etc.

When we resumed setup, it completed setup and finally started the Windows desktop. All of our files were still there, and we did not have any other problems. We went back to the BIOS settings, reactivated the devices, and plugged everything back in. No problems!