So I think that I have picked up a nasty virus which has crashed my laptop. It is in an endless loop of trying to reboot.

I have read many of the previous posts on this site and I am still stuck.

Basically I load in my XP CD. I get to the set up screen that asks

Install

Repair

or Quit

I choose install. I accept the End User License Agreement'. Then I get to the list of partitions. Sometimes.
and sometimes it says Unknown Disk. (I have tried this a few times to no avail)

If it does show a partition i have tried to delete it and it says i can not and then reboots me.

If i try to set up Windows XP it gives me a blue screen error and then reboots me.

I would like to just clean everything off and start from scratch but the setup disk is not helping.

any ideas? :!:

What is you're laptop specs, some of them have a restore partition that is on the harddrive.

it is a Jettbook 2300A Pentium4

This is the error message i get once i try to install XP or delete any partitions

STOP: 0x0000008E (0xc0000005, 0xf84d6cfd, 0xf8085800, 0x00000000)

setupdd.sys - address f84D6CFD base at F84AD000, DateStamp 3d6dd67f

can you get back into windows at all? did you make any changes to your laptop?

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315335

CAUSE
This behavior may occur if one of the following conditions is true:
• One or more of the random access memory (RAM) modules that are installed on your computer are faulty.
• The RAM configuration is incompatible with Windows XP.

I have not made any changes that I know of. It just shut down on its own and I have yet to be able to reboot.

Not too much info on Jetbook out there, but maybe this will help. Get a bootable 3.5" floppy with Windows 98 on it. Boot up with it and format the hard drive(format C without the ( ) not startup with CD ROM support, and put in the XP CD. and type setup. This may work, or once formated the XP CD is bootable too.

what? I fail to see how this is going to help, since he can't even really select a partition... and, who wants to install XP on FAT 32. uck! floppy boot disks are depreciated. (note: win XP is the last MS OS that will have a floppy boot disk. and if you want the setup disks, you need to dl them from MS directly)

honestly tho, this sounds like a hardware problem... its either a hard drive problem or memory problem... but with out exact error messages it will be alot harder to troubleshoot...

You got bad ram or motherboard or cpu. no doubt about it. if it is a desktop, strip all the add in cards out of it, take it down to 1 DIMM, 1 cd drive, 1 hardrive. try to install again. if it fails, swap out the 1 dimm with a different one. If it fails again, get a new MOBO-CPU (motherboard and cpu combo) from Tiger Direct www.tigerdirect.com then rebuild your machine. You'll probably want new DDR ram to go with it.

first time user here. i am studying at tafe college and have pc doing same. took hard drive, optical drives, floppy and cpu out and ran with another pc, all good. ram was touchy but it always was. had to reinsert it every time it was moved cause it would start beeping. we isolated as much as we could but it seems the m/board is to fault. cant load more than first 60 secs of xp. any1 have similar exp?