Brian & Mary:
Sorry for my last garbled post. Hope the following makes a bit more sense...
As I understand the current situation Mary is now involved in a "fresh"
install of the XP OS, i.e., she's "reformatted" the intended boot drive. I
suppose it's reasonable to assume that there's no user-created data
currently on the disk that she must retrieve at this point. So that there's
no concern on that aspect here.
Frankly, it sounds to me that this is simply a botched installation routine
and assuming that Mary has an XP installation CD I would think the most
practical course of action at this point is that she should "start over" as
it were, using the installation CD to delete any existing partition(s) and
simply go through the setup process again. I trust she's not using any
third-party tools to "reformat" the disk, etc.
Of course, there's always the possibility of a defective HDD and that's why
I previously recommended the diagnostic utility routine. Similarly a
defective CD could also be an issue although that's been so rare in our
experience that we discount it at the outset.You'll note that in a
subsequent post by Mary she asked "what's an OEM?". SoI really can't tell
exactly what we're dealing with here and whether that factor plays a part in
her problem.
Anna
