Urgent help needed

Silly me purchased an ASUS F3 series laptop for my sons birthday! He loves it, but hates the vista operating system. So Smarty Trousers took my windows Xp home edition disk , to a mates place- along with his new laptop so the pair of rocket scientists could reformat it with the XP Disk. He now is in the dog house and I am sitting here wondering how to undo the damage he and fool number two have done! All Im getting when I try to boot using thr XP disk is A message saying No operating system.. I have gotten the install process to sart a few times, but - it only goes so far then the screen goes blue and the following message appears:_
A problem has been detected and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.

Check to be sure you have adequate disk space. If a driver is identified in the stop message, disable the driver or check with the manufacturer for driver updates. Try changing video adapters.

Check with your hardware vendor for any bios updates. Disable Bios memory options such as caching or Shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to remove or disable components , restart your computer, press f 8 to select advanced startup options, and then select safe mode.

Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005,0xf7a2a208,0xF7a29f08)

*** pci sys - ADDRESS F75DE0BF base at F7000, Datestamp 3b7855c


I feel a fool for buying this laptop secondhand opff E-bay, (even though it was working fantastic when it arrived, allthough No owners manual was provided with it. Anyway Any help would be greatly apreciated Yours Respectfully
Rodney

 

You can try this: Change your hard disk interface from AHCI (SATA) to IDE in your bios. that may help

 

0x00007A and 0x00007B are related to issues with SATA drivers, but I do not think that 0x00007E is the same. You can still try mooler's suggestion.

Do you have a Vista disc that you can attempt an installation with? That will help us narrow down the problem.

 

If your Asus came with a restore partition, you can simply restore Vista by hitting F9 during boot.

 

Nah, you know his kid formatted the whole drive and that partition is long gone.

 

On a Dutch site I read that Asus doesn't offer XP driver but that these can be used (information from august 2007);
video driver: ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/F5R/VGA_XP_070202.zip
card reader driver : ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/F5R/Card_Reader_USB_XP_061221.zip
network driver: www.realtek.com.tw
wireless network driver: http://www.atheros.com/news/AR5006EX.html
audio driver: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Maybe you should erase the disk with a program like Active@Killdisk and start with a clean, completely wiped drive?
Perhaps your son didn't format the drive (completely) and it's still half full with Vista.
Cheers.

 

No need to use disk wiping software... Just use the tool built into the Windows XP Installer... you will need a license though.

 

I believe 7E could related to a bunch of different things. If my memory serves me correctly, it could encompass bios settings as well. its worth a shot