Laptop Worries

[CronoTriggerfan]

I just got a laptop from ebay, it's a P3 Vaio with 128mb of RAM (upgrading that ). The auction said that the harddrive was working on Windows 2000, but had been wiped since, and the only testing after that had been to boot to the "No Operating System Detected" screen. So when I got it, I tried to install XPlite rev 5, it goes through all the installation measures, but when it says "Starting Windows", the screen right before it asks you to select a partition to install to, it crashes and tells me to restart. I've reburned the ISO and tried installing on another CD, same thing. And I just installed this OS on another laptop literally 20 minutes ago, and it worked fine, so it's not my burn. Right now I'm downloading Puppy Linux to see if that works. But what am I doing wrong? Is the harddrive bad or something?

CTFan

[Limewater]

I've reburned the ISO and tried installing on another CD, same thing. And I just installed this OS on another laptop literally 20 minutes ago, and it worked fine, so it's not my burn.
CTFan

Have you tried yanking the hard drive from the questionable laptop and replacing it with the one from the laptop where you just did a successful install?

If you can then install the OS successfully, that would definitely tell you it is a hard drive problem.

I don't know about all hard drive failures, but I know that when I accidentally crushed mine to death (a cooler fell on it), it gave the "No operating system found" message, so it could easily be broken.

Good luck!

[swordbellums]

it might be the cd drive. I installed ubuntu the other day on a laptop. at first it kept on saying that the cd was faulty, but it was fine on another computer, so I replaced the cd drive and it worked fine.

[jeroen]

Avatar........too.......big............dying.

[jackfb13]

Avatar........too.......big............dying.

*Beats avatar off computer
screen*