How can I save my laptop??

Hope this is in the right thread!

Okay guys.. thanks for clicking in.. well I desparately need help to save my Asus W5A. I know it's old, but if it can be saved I rather do that than buy a new notebook.

In short my laptop doesn't boot into Windows at all, so I can't get into Safe Mode to fix it. It all happened many months ago when I clicked on a link and the next thing I know the laptop rebooted it self and it kept doing that over and over because I think it has a boot sector virus. I'm usually a pretty safe and cautious user, so I'm still beating myself up for letting it happen.

So I decided to reinstall Windows with the Asus Recovery CD that came with the laptop. While it was recovering I remember that my optical drive only works like half the time and next thing I know, the installation is frozen.

I figured my next and last option would be to install from a USB stick. I'm pretty sure that the W5A supports booting via USB, but I don't have too much experience in that yet. I've read many articles and did the formating with the HP utility and all that stuff but it still doesn't seem to boot from the USB key.

So is there a way to clone 1 to 1 the Asus Recovery CD onto a USB stick? I think that might be the simpliest solution. I dunno what other options I have left.. or if there was an easier way to solve my problem. I do want to note that my laptop did come with a legit copy of Windows XP and want to keep it that way!

Thanks in advance everyone!

 

Did you set it to run from USB in the BIOS?

 

USB solution would be easier, as Shaythong said, you have to set the boot order to boot from the USB drive. If that doesn't work, then you could also copy the entire i386 folder on to the hard disk and then launch the installer by running winnt.exe. But you still need a bootable CD to boot the computer to launch the installer. I’ve done this once on a FAT32 partition, but I guess you should be able to do this even on a NTFS partition provided you can find a bootable CD image with NTFS access.

 

You probably caught a nagware disguising itself as a virus/system scanner. How old is your laptop? It probably won't detect the USB installation unless it says so in the BIOS. I would try to install from the recovery disc first to see what happens since that would be the simplest way.

 

Yeah I'm pretty sure I've set it so it does boot to usb. I've set the boot order so "removeable disk" comes first. The bios detects my usb as a hard drive and I even ordered that before the hard drive in the laptop and tried setting that first on the boot order and still doesn't work

 

Provided the USB drive has sufficient capacity, you should be able to clone the recovery partition over onto the USB drive using something like Acronis True Image Home - I've used that before to clone an entire hdd, including installed operating system and hidden recovery partition, with no ill effect.