I have a laptop that has been borked for a while. It has Windows XP, but no longer boots up. I receive an error, but I can't recall what it says since it's been so long since I've used it.
That said, I'd like to install the Win 7 beta OS on this laptop. Does anyone know the best way to do this? Please keep in mind that I can't even access safe mode on the laptop, so I don't think I can do a CD/Flash drive install of the OS. I also do not need any of the data on the HD, so if I need to do a full wipe, that would be fine.
Have you tried putting the CD in the drive and seeing if you can get to the part of the boot that asks if you would like to boot from the CD? You could always try putting the CD in and turning it on, then pressing the key that should be listed to get you into the boot menu so you can just select the CD/DVD drive. If you can't get to those points, it should like the drive is too shot to work with. Every time I have a drive go bad, which thankfully is not that often, I take it as a blessing to upgrade my drive, lol.
like what Tronyx mentioned, confirm that your hard drive is still functioning. if you can't even boot it up it could be due to faulty hard drive. otherwise, make sure that the win 7 cd is bootable. you gotta burn it as an iso image on the cd. put the cd in, boot up your laptop, press they key to get into your BIOS setup to get to the boot menu to boot it from the cd, save and exit. at this point it should boot from the bootable win 7 cd and you're good to go from there.
but why win 7? are your laptop specs good enough to run win 7?
I can't even get into the boot menu, the laptop doesn't register anything when I hit the key. Might be a HD issue then?
As for why Win 7, I just wanted to try it out and see how it works. I can't remember exactly what my specs are exactly, but I know I at least have 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, 2+ ghz core 2 duo, and a 7950 GTX gfx card.
!