Unique (I think) problem installing OS's

Ok, I've been searching these forums, and I haven't found anything that directly answers my problems. I'm sorry to have my first post be one asking for help

I bought a refurbished Aspire one, and when I first booted it up, it said cannot find ntldr. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to reload XP (probably my first mistake) and so I attempted to. I followed the instructions on installing with a USB flash drive, and it was working. I went through the text portion of the setup, and then it restarted my computer. I pressed f12 in order to boot from the USB again, and I selected #2 the GUI install, the windows screen started running, but it never stopped. My one never made it to the login screen, the little green bars just kept going from left to right across the screen for hours.

I have tried three different ISO's of the xp just to see if that was the reason. I tested the ISO's on another computer and they worked fine on the other computer, but no such luck on the one.

I then decided, well, maybe I could try linux, at least until I get the XP figured out. So, I downloaded UBUNTU and made a bootable USB drive for that. When I used that on the "one" the loading screen showed up for about 5 seconds and then the whole computer shut off. Then I downloaded Xubuntu and tried it as well, same result. I tested the Xubuntu on another computer, and again it worked.

Oh, and Alt+f10 doesn't work anymore... I wasn't thinking and I formatted that partition.

If anybody has any ideas about this I would love to hear them.

 

First off this should not be posted in the beginners section off the forum.

What are the specs of your Aspire One? Specifically, your hard drive size and model.

Have you tried the Unofficial Aspire One Recovery CD from this forum?

 

sorry, I wasn't sure where to post this.

umm, it's an aspire one a150 (it's a 160gb win xp version)

if somebody could move this to the proper location that would be great.

 

Was XP previously installed on this Aspire One?

If so, have you tried to recover XP using the Acer recovery option?

Can you tell me the model or your hard drive? WD=Western Digital, HT=Hitachi and I'm unaware of others.

 

yes, XP was originally on the Harddrive... I can't use the ALT+F10, because I (stupidly) formatted it without thinking.

As for the type of hard drive used, I'm not sure. I can find out and post back here.

 

Only reason I'm asking is because I might have a solution for you but it evolves totally wiping out your hard drive including the Acer XP recovery partition, which means you won't be able to use the Acer recovery feature in the future.

If you don't care about the XP recovery partition and just want to be able to install an OS try this, you'll need a USB drive for this to work:

***NOTE***: This may void warranty, so if you have the option to send back on warranty try that first!

Tools needs:

For Western Digital: http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... =2&lang=en

For Hitachi: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d ... eatureTool

Virtual Floppy Drive: http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmwar ... l#download

HP Drive Key Boot Utility : http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... R1002_USEN

1. Do full format Fat32 to USB drive.

2. Create Virutal Floppy Drive then install/make a floppy diskette with one of the hard drive tools on your virtual floppy.

3. Install HP Drive Boot Tool and create bootable USB drive using files from Virtual Floppy.

4. Now your USB drive is bootable with the hard drive format tool on it, reboot and press F12 repeatably.

5. Select USB drive and boot into the Utility, using the Utility write zeros to your hard drive (Full Option).

6. Now you hard drive is totally clear and you can proceed install Windows/Linux from USB!