A8J problems :((

First of all I'm Galen, and this forum is awesome. Its where I learned about Asus and did most of my laptop research. My A8J came last week from milesonepc. It was shipped on time, and packaged very well. I drove home from college to pick it up. To my suprise, when i turned it on, it woudlnt boot up the OS. So after dicking around i took it to a friends house and he noticed that the hard drive was formatted as a 100GB drive, when I ordered the optional 80 gig 7200 rpm drive. Anyhow we got it up and running, a little hokey it seemed, but I've been using it for the past week. Last night, I finally managed to install enough stuff that it decided to crash, and it kept restarting itself. I decided to just reinstall windows. I figured in an hour i can reinstall XP, some drivers, and get aim and word, and that will get me going reliably, untill christmas time when I'll get the chance to do it up right so i can dual boot Linux. This is my problem. I cannot get the recovery CD to work. I get to the screen where it says "do you want to recover XP? I say yes...it gets an error. I say NO..which i really want the No option, I dont want to recover anything, and it just sits there and says a:\ After that no matter what I try, its a "bad command or filename" Somehow I need to get past this so i can install XP. Thats all im trying to do here. I called milestonepc today, but he didn't answer. I'm sure this isnt his fault, but I thought maybe he has encountered this problem before. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Galen

I just want to clarify that I'm not blaming Milestonepc for my problem. I wouldnt hesitate to buy from them again. I was a little ticked about them shipping my comptuter in a state that it woudlnt even turn on, with a incorrectly formatted hard drive, but, it happans.

 

What error does it give you when you say Yes to the "do you want to recover XP" question?

 

I cant remember off hand, but its some long BS about how it just isnt working lol. I think i know what the problem is. I think since the formatting is screwed up, its all confused and it doesnt want to let it recover. I need a real windows XP cd, and It should be fine. I'm going to discuss this solution tomorrow with Milestonepc.

 

I had a similar problem after I messed up my system repartitioning my HDD. When I followed the instructions prompted by the recovery discs I got a message about some hal file missing. To get the recovery CDs to work, I went through the first 2 OS recovery CDs, but when it asked to insert the drivers and applications disc, instead of inserting it, I just reset the laptop. Subsequently, it completed a clean windows install. The drawback is you have to manually install all the drivers and utilities one at a time, but this can also be seen as a positive as you get to only install the applications and utilities you want leaving a much less bloated windows install

Although after reading your problem more thoroughly, it sounds like it is probably a different issue, since you can't even get the recovery started.

 

There is no wrong formated HD, I remembered one day we had no 80G HD on hand, for some 80G orders, we just gave free upgrade to 100G, from what you said, I think you are one of them, tell me your order number, I can arrange someone to call you

 

My mistake, MilestonePC just confirmed my HD is a 100 GB one instead, so it wasn't formatted wrong. We're both trying to figure out what is going on with the recovery disk though!