asus recovery help - will not work -a8jp

I am trying to recover first partition only. Tried both the partition on the hard drive and the recovery disks. Recovery starts, but after only a minute or two it asks for the driver disk (without apparently copying any files) and then gives an error about disk not ready for recovery or something along those lines after I put in the driver disk.

I don't know if it is because vista is already on the hard drive and it is having some problem with partitions, or what. My recovery disk is an xp disk and I'm trying to recover over a vista install on the C drive. It absolutely will not run the recovery like it should!

Any help or experience would be appriciated!
P.S. I have not touched the recovery partition that came on the machine, and have no problem starting it that way but it does not work either.

 

no one has had problems reinstalling with the recovery? again, I think it must have something to do with vista or maybe the ntfs converted drives... not a clue! If I knew the password of the ghost images on the disks or the recovery partition there would be no problem either...

 

It's a little unclear what's going on, so maybe some more info will get the right help. So here goes:

It sounds like you installed Vista on your A8Jp. Did you install it on C or on another partition? If you installed it on C (obliterating XP), then the reinstall should work If you installed Vista on another partition, I suppose there could be some conflict going on.

Not sure what you mean about passwords. If you are attempting a clean OS install from the recovery CD, you don't need a password. Are you selecting a clean install or that it format first? In order to remove the Vista install, it will need to delete all the files on the hard drive and repartition everything.

The drives being NTFS shouldn't be an issue if you're doing a clean install. If you're trying to install XP on its own partition to dual boot, then you should convert that partition to FAT32. There's something about how the setup files read/write that requires FAT32. You can convert back to NTFS afterward.

There are a number of posts on reinstalling XP in the Windows and OS forum.

And there is a topic Downgrade Vista to XP that has some info on this.

 

Try cleaning the c partition prior to installation. And perhaps also boot in DOS and issue a fdisk /mbr.

Or you might just have a faulty drivers disk...

For installing Windows XP from recovery disks, see my guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=81741

 

Yep vista is on the 1st C partition. About the password, the actual norton ghost image is password locked on the cd and the drive, for obvious reasons I guess and it cannot be accessed without running the recovery process, that is all that I meant.

Let me explain a little better. I start the process with the recovery disks, and it loads a few initial items, then enters symantec ghost to, I assume, ghost the image over the first partition. Since it doesn't really show exactly what it is doing, all I know is almost immediatly ( within a minute) it justs asks for the driver dvd, and then give me an error that this is no the recovery cd or something along those lines. Then I have to restart the computer. It's erroring on SOMETHING when it starts, and I just can't see what it is.

P.S. Now that I think of it, before I RMAd my laptop I had the same problem on my other one once vista was installed as well. It has to be something strange that i'm not seeing...

 

I also had problems using the recovery CD. In my case, it would go through the entire process and totally fail to boot.

I gave up and installed Vista, now I'm requesting a REAL Windows XP cd from Asus.... they've yet to get back to me.. (been over a week).

 

Here's a couple of things you can try:

1) I've had a similar problem with the system not recognizing the driver cd; I just tried again after a forced reboot. Make sure you insert the driver cd and let it finish spinning up before hitting a button to continue, as it may not read it if you initiate too quickly (at least that seemed to be my problem)

2) the only thing that vista could change AFAIK for there to be a problem installing XP is the boot sector; try using BART PE and winimage to reload the boot sector as explained here. It's for a W3J but the process should work regardless. Alternatively, you can get SuperFDisk and that will have an option to clear the boot sector as well. Either method will allow you to remove the Vista boot and replace it with XP.

 

Well, perhaps you have all missed my post above. That's the first suggestion I gave: to avoid conflicts with the Vista installation, cleanup the Vista partition and issue a FDISK /MBR. No fancy software required, just a FreeDOS CD.

 

OK i'll give the fdisk /mbr a try when I get home. Also the driver cd spinup thing might be useful, as I tend to press ok before it spins up /shrug guess I will just see. This has been driving me crazy!

 

Sorry bout that EBE, didn't realize you had said that already