Manually Reinstalling XP on nx6125

to cut a long story short.........I have ended up with an nx6125 with a formatted HDD, and a piece of crap non working matsu****a dvd tray (when is someone at hp or matsu****a going to take responsibility for this drive?)...........so you can already see that I am at a great disadvantage when it comes to restoring my notebook to working order. especially when it also doesnt have a floppy drive in the first place ..........things I have tried:

following instructions to create a bootable USB Flash pen drive/ USB external HDD..............but I haven't succeeded

attempting to use a PCMCIA external CD Rom drive.........not succeeded

installing XP in a different laptop to then place into the nx6125.......not succeeded (blinking cursor in the top left hand corner)

using a different HDD setup for a different notebook..........not succeeded (the same blinking cursor in the top left hand corner)

the latter two have confused me somewhat and I can only guess that the nx6125 is expecting to find a specific boot partition setup.........does anyone have more info on this or can suggest anything to ease my problems please?

any help would really be appreciated and may let me keep some of my hair!

 

My two cents.

Blinking cursor thing: can be different geometry of the hard-drive due to BIOS differences. See if there is "LARGE" enabled on one of the notebooks.

I would not install XP on another notebook - too much difference in hardware. I would install DOS and put a copy of XP CD into a sub-directory. After booting into DOS (on nx6125) I would run XP's setup directly from the hard-drive.

And the usual gripe: I'm not familiar nx6125, so I don't know if it is SATA or not, but if it is I would disable native mode in BIOS.

 

And my 2 cents.
Are you trying to do this the cheap way or the easy way? I'd just replace the dvd drive and order the restore discs from hp.

 

Aversio

Well as HP dont supply disks in the first place I dont see why they should receive more money for them............of course the replacement cd drive has crossed my mind but I would like to take my time in researching that before investing in potentially another flawed drive recommended by who are supposed to be a reputable company who know their oats.

I also work in support so I dont give up that easily

Guka

thanks for your suggestions.........I have also started considering the dos way of thinking but of course I have no floppy or cd rom so it very much relies on being able to turn a usb device into something that boots....and to then install the relevant drivers for the external usb cdrom that I have

thx for the native and large tips.........i'm not scared off by the differences in hardware as driver issues can be resolved ...and it would also mean that my XP installation issues would have been solved

cheers
Spook