AAO went dead trying to get windows going

I got a 1.5/160/3 cell linux aao a few days ago hoping to install xp (there is no xp version with 1.5 ram available in my area). I haven't had much luck getting the windows installer to complete, when it restarts for the second time it just goes back to the text install instead of the gui stage as expected. I was using bartpe on a usb hard drive to do this, and I have been able to get the comp to boot without the usb drive attached by just copying over bartpe.iso and the other boot files (plus the i386 folder from xp cd for installation) to the internal drive (as a side note this seems like this would circumvent the problem of the internal drive continuing to appear as d: after install).

Since I couldn't get the install to complete properly I was thinking to try just copying over the windows folder and boot files from a working installation (did a fresh install in vmware to do this). When I first tried this there was some type of error and windows didnt load, not a big surprise as I'm grasping at straws here. In my defense I have started up computers with windows hard drives from other computers so I figured there might be some way to do something equivalent here.

The last thing I did before the computer went dead was to change the names of boot.ini (I had read that without this file, ntldr will just look in c:\windows) and ntdetect.com (i'm thinking screwing with this file may have caused the problem). I had read in the wikipedia article on ntldr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR) that "To load an NT-based OS, ntdetect.com must also be present. (Strictly speaking, only NTLDR is actually required. If boot.ini is missing, NTLDR will default to C:\Windows on the first partition of the first hard drive." I took this to mean that ntdetect was not required but I read later that it works with BIOS to find out what devices are installed.

Anyway, when I restarted the system nothing came up on the screen at all, and the power button no longer worked either. Reattaching the usb harddrive to try to boot from it makes no difference, and connecting a monitor to the vga port does nothing either. The only sign of life aside from the power light is the sound of the hard drive running. At this stage I can't think of anything to do but try to return it on warranty. I really couldn't have imagined that a couple of missing files would mess up the computer this bad, it's not as if I was messing around with directly with bios or anything. I was expecting more of a "file missing" error if it didn't work. I'm not looking forward to talking to the service guys at the computer store if I have to bring it back.

 

well if when you go to turn it on the light of the power button only turns on and you hear the hard drive running but you cant get the screen to turn on it might be a bios problem.

this link will help you with it as it did for me
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery.html

hope that works

 

Oops, realized there was already a thread on the dead aao issue: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=903&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Used the bios fix from http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer ... overy.html which brought it back to life.

Still no closer to a working windows install, I get a safe mode options menu followed by a blue screen that flashes for a split second before restart, too fast to read.

Edit: thanks anyway DDB, didn't see your post but I found the same page.

 

Update: finally got xp going this morning. I used nlite and "usb multiboot 10" which basically does everything for you and neatly gets around the problem I was having with not launching the gui part of windows setup.

 

Did you use a USB stick or a USB CD-ROM drive for the XP installation. Using an external CD-ROM will make installing XP alot easier.

 

As would using a U3 USB key (which you can mod to have the U3 CD-ROM become XP CD-ROM and load XP from it).

 

A usb cd drive likely would have saved me a lot of frustration but I didn't want to buy any additional hardware just to be able to do this. Actually I have one somewhere but I couldn't find it, I haven't really needed to use it since my last subnotebook died.

The external hard drive I used was a 2.5" mediasonic media center/usb enclosure with a 160 gb ide drive from another notebook I had that died. If anyone is interested in that type of thing for watching xvid etc on a tv I would say it's a pretty good machine for the money (paid CAD$50 w/o hd), main downsides are that it won't play some downloaded xvid files and it only works as a media center when the HD is FAT format, so no long file names or >4g files.

I would recommend the "usb multiboot" solution to anyone having trouble installing xp as it's an all-in-one solution (you only need xp install disc) and not too finicky. You can also put in your cd key before building the disc, I hate having to type those things out again and again. I found out about it from a youtube video by this younger british guy. When it starts up from the drive you choose from a menu between text install and gui install (text the first time and gui the second) which prevented the issue i was having where the gui stage would never start. It also leaves your hard drive as C: instead of having to mess around to change it from d: as some people here have apparently had to do.