W3V with Frustrating Problems

Hi all,

if anyone can help I would be very, very grateful. My W3V is over four years old, with many problems, but as I see it should still be quite usable as long as I can get a new HD installed.

Factory HD and DVD Burner have both failed by now. I am using a USB External DVD drive and recently put a new HD in the laptop. Unfortunately, the Recovery CDs dont seem to work! Neither of the two will lead anywhere, instead it says that the CD cannot be found. When I instead put the "Driver and Utility" disc in and choose to boot from the external DVD drive, it begins the "preinstallation environment" but eventually gives an error message over a blue screen with a mountain top in the background. This error states: 'System does not ready for preinstallation. please Recovery Pure OS first. Please eject CD from the device and press OK to restart.'

Now I'm stuck - any ideas what the problem is here? Is there any way for me to install windows onto this new HD with or without the Asus Recovery material?

 

one way is to buy an xp retail and download drivers from asus website.

 

Try going into your BIOS and set your SATA option to compatible mode first prior to using the recovery disk.