dayofdefeat909

hey guys, i've got a dell inspiron 8600. before you rag on me for buying a dell, just know that i've only ever had one problem with it and that was when i accidentally spilled tap water on the keyboard; it was fixed with no problems. the laptop was amazing (i consistently played day of defeat at max resolution open gL 1280x1024 getting 60 fps while having itunes play music in addtion to having my options trading platform running as well). i recently decided to reformat it even though it was working fine, simply because it had some viruses which Norton couldn't deal with (it could only quarantine them but it couldn't repair or delete the infected files) and i am now out of school for the summer with a lot of time on my hands :]. basically i wanted a clean machine. i've reformatted multiple computers in the past using win98 so i figured that reformatting a laptop for XP professional couldn't be that difficult...

to begin, i booted from the cd-rom using the OEM win XP professional CD with sp1 which, according to dell tech support, was the only way to reformat the C: drive as i could find no way to reboot straight to DOS mode (can you even do that with an NTFS formatted drive?). i deleted the main partition, reformatted it and then windows began to install itself immediately and this is where the problem starts, a problem which another thread of mine ( XP installation HELP~! ) in the windows XP help section is trying to resolve but i'd like to make sure i did the format correctly. [so you know, the problem with the installation starts when it says there are ~39 minutes left; a window pops up saying windows cannot find the file 'asms' located in D:\I386, which is purportedly releated to communications issues with the cd-rom drive (was working fine the night before...)]

did i format correctly by first deleting the main partition? (there were 4 partitions, a 57 mb free unused partition, 1 and 3 gig partitions used to store basic system files [one is the system partition I think? why else would they be used?] and the 37 gig main partition which i deleted.) it would not let me format the 37 gig partition unless i deleted it. so did this, and windows reformatted this space. windows began to install and the problem began. i'll keep this post up to date with all my attempts to rectify this problem.

laboye

Well, you've done everything correctly! Blow out all of the partitions and create one massive partition. Format it under NTFS and let it install. Your problem seems like a simple old CD access problem. Be sure that your installation media is sparkling clean, as there are large files in i386. If I am reading this correctly, you have done nothing wrong.

For clarification, what version are you installing?

-XP Home
-XP Pro
-XP MCE