I recently got a laptop about a month ago, it's a Dell Inspiron 1300, is meant to have 60GB of space (though that is debatable!), ram of 512 and basically has all the latest programmes and Windows XP Home Edition already on it.
To connect to my College network you need XP Professional and since I still had my installation cd (also only about 4 or 5 months old) from a previous home computer that I installed it on, but is now broken and of no use I decided to install XP Professional.
The first time there were some problems, it got about halfway through the installation and said some files could not be copied. At the time it asked me whether I wanted to overwrite my current Home Edition pack, which my mother (she tried the first installation) said no. We assumed that maybe you could only install XP Professional from that cd once, that it was some new measure of Microsoft to prevent piracy or something.
I tried installing it a second time, only this time it never asked me whether I wanted to overwrite Home Edition. Again I got halfway through and then it crashed on me so I rebooted, only now it's caught in a permanent loop that I can't get it out of.
The loop starts with the computer starting up and then goes to the Installation Setup page, basically it says that at the top of a blue screen, an error message comes up that is too quick for me to read and restarts.
Now I tried calling Microsoft on one of those helplines and apart from being very confusing, we discovered this. While installing XP Professional it deleted Home Edition so the computer can't start up the Home Edition programme (or whatever you call that) and since XP Professional is only half installed that's no use either. My computer is caught in limbo, I guess.
The technician told me the problem may have lain with my antivirus programme (Mc Affee, knew the git would cause me problems!). He asked whether I had de-installed it before upgrading my pack, which of course I hadn't. Something to note, when I first installed XP Professional on my home computer a few months earlier I had Norton Antivirus and not Mc Affee so I'm guessing those two programmes work differently to each other.
I changed the mode from which my laptop boots the information from, so it's now set on the cd drive and we tried booting it from my installation cd of XP Professional. That didn't work, neither did it solve the problem.
The technician told me I had two options, either get the reinstallation cd of Home Edition (Which Dell tells me is in the post so I'm waiting) or do a complete system recovery, i.e. lose everything. I don't want to do that as I've some very valuable documents on there I really want to recover so I won't choose that option unless there is no other choice.
The question is, apart from what happened to my laptop is, could I reinstall Windows Home Edition from the cd even though the laptop has no operating system on it (that was the programme name for it!) and be able to recover my documents and files?
Basically how do I install Windows Home Edition (when it comes) with kmy laptop in its current state and will I have access to all my documents again?
Sorry about the lengthy description and all, but they administrator did say the more the merrier!
Serious problem with Windows XP while upgrading to XP Professional
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Linear Mode
