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    Gateway 8510GZ Restore/Install Problem

    Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by HJS, Aug 24, 2007.

  1. HJS

    HJS Newbie

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    :confused: I have a Gateway 8510GZ which was purchased new with XP Home. It was acting a little flaky recently (Norton detected a virus) so I dedided for better or worse to do a clean install of XP Professional. The drive was formatted and recovery partition deleted. It was going OK until the install gave a message that a file/folder "ASMS" was missing.

    Now whenever I restart the computer it boots from the hard drive, XP Pro starts with the message "setup is being restarted", and it asks for the XP install CD to be inserted. But at this point the keyboard and mouse are frozen, so I can't do anything. The only way out is to power off. The computer itself however does not appear to be frozen as vaious Windows XP welcome and promotional messages keep recycling in the background.

    I tried putting both the Gateway restore CD #1 of 4 and the XP Pro CD in the CD/DVD drive before turning the power on, thinking I could get it to boot from the CD, which is first in the BIOS boot sequence. But it seems to ignore the CD and always boots from the hard drive. I hear the CD make a few spins but that's it. The CD/DVD drive does show up in the boot messages when the machine is turned on.

    Any ideas how to get this going, either restoring from the Gateway disks or completing the XP install? I also have available an external CD reader/writer; could I get it to boot from that if I suspect something is wrong with the combo drive in the machine?

    :) EDITED: Well this is wierd. I've been battling this for the last 48 hours, must have rebooted 50 times, so I just gave it one more shot. Put the Gateway restore CD in the internal combo drive, turned on the power and off it went. Currently recreating the recovery partition, we'll see if it's successful. Go figure, I don't understand it! I think the CD/DVD drive may be failing; do combo drives that can read and write both CD's and DVD's give more trouble in this regard?

    Curious: Have any of you ever booted one of these machines (or any Windows computer) from an external device (usb, firewire, flash card or whatever? What worked?

    Thanks.
     
    HJS, Aug 24, 2007
    #1