HP Laptop Cannot Read Win XP Disc

[greliu]

Hello everyone, I have an older HP laptop and recently decided to reformat it and now I'm having issues. The hard drive is clean and has no OS on it, and the HP recovery partition has been erased as well. Now, when I try to install Win XP and it keeps telling me that it does not detect a previous version of windows and that it is unable to open the CD in the drive. Now, I have tried Win XP, Vista, and 7. The laptop will not read any of these CDs. Do I have to reinstall the drivers for the laptop by booting with a jump drive? I don't know what to do on this one. Thanks for any information on the matter.

 

[Saga Lout]

You seem to have either a lot of dud installation CDs and DVDs or a single dud optical drive. Can you borrow an external? First, check in BIOS that it will allow USB Legacy Support so there's power to the USB ports at boottime.

 

[greliu]

I know the XP CD is not a dud since I have used it before. However, I may have a dud drive. Unfortunately, I don't have access to an external drive at this time. I believe the laptop does allow me to boot from the USB port. If it does, should I reinstall the drivers for the optical drive? Thanks for any information.

 

[Saga Lout]

A new installation will take care of that driver issue - if it is a driver issue. Sometimes - -and annoyingly frequently with TSSB drives - a Registry corruption knocks them out.

 

[greliu]

So does that mean the clean installation won't work, and the jump drive with the optical drives drivers won't work either, therefore, my only options is access to an external drive? Thanks on any information.

 

[Saga Lout]

You could experiment by downloading rc.iso and burinng it to a USB flash drive. If that boots the system then the culprit is definitely the optical drive. You could also use the Recovery Console to run Checkdisk - syntax is chkdsk /r - to check the hard disk for errors.

I'm fairly confident this download link is safe. http://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?/topic/150212-boot-to-recovery-console-wo-xp-cd/