Problem with laptop, cannot install Windows XP?

[ECruzDigital]

Hi Folks,

I hope if you can help with answers.

My friend gave me his DELL Inspiron 1501 laptop. He said he bought a new hard drive that matches as his old one that's worn out. But he bought one with bigger spaces, 500 GB hard drive for the DELL Insprion 1501.

When he installed the new hard drive, and was ready to install Windows XP Home Edition, an error message first comes up before you do anything else.

The error message says. "Error Operating System"

I tried to installed Windows XP Home Edition for my friend, I got the CD ROM going, it says "Press any keys to boot CD".
Then all the sudden, that same error message "Error operationing system" showed up again, before ready to install XP.

So, can you tell me what's this error message mean for this DELL Inspiron 1501 laptop for my friend who bought a 500 GB
hard drive??? He purchased it from "Amazon" and he found the exact same hard drive, accept it has bigger spaces. The one that he had and worn out was a 50 GB hard drive.

Any boddy knows what's wrong here??

Thank you,
Eugene

[kpmedia]

That sounds like a typical bad hard drive. I recently tried to install Windows XP on an old laptop, and it refused to cooperate. Yes, this means the "new" hard drive may also be bad. You'd be wise to plug it into an external enclosure ($10 is all it costs for a 2.5" enclosure) and then let a known-good computer run tests on it via USB.

Just for grins, try to install Xubuntu on the laptop. It tends to give far better error messages on failed installs.

Official site: http://xubuntu.org
Download hint: Use torrents to download in about 15 minutes. The FTP mirrors are slows -- hours and hours slow.

[ECruzDigital]

Thank you for your FAST response, KPMedia.

I jsut talied to my friend, and he was able to view your message on my posting, also.
He decided to send that hard drive back to Amazon.com and get another one.

Uh, when people get new hard drive, what is it suppose to say on the computer screen??
I forgot what usually says before you install Windows.

Thanks,
Eugene

[JMP]

Usually its something along the lines of "Operating System Not Found" or a similar message.

One thing that can also cause a slight bit of a pain is to have the bios ONLY boot from the CD, so it has no choice but to boot off it. It could be that even though it says press any key, it still bypassing it and booting from the hard drive (I have had this happen to me in the past).

If you can get it to install that way, after installation you can switch the boot order back to normal in the bios.

It has been awhile and you may have already remedied the situation but thought I would add my in.

-JMP

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