ACER A1 netbook failure installing XP

R

rockscreation16

Hey all. This is my first post, but I've found much helpful information from this site in the past. Can't thank you guys enough for the helpful information you take the time to share.

I've just acquired an Acer Aspire One D250-1042 that was supposed to come with XP. Of course, that's the operating system that was installed by factory default in the first place. Evidently the last owner upgraded to windows 7.

I don't so much mind having 7 on it, but the mobile printer i'm using for invoice printing requires XP or older. So, I had to find a way to get XP on this device. The seller had an acer XP disk that they sent me.

I went through the process of installing xp (which took forever with this dinky USB dvd-rom).

Once installing XP I ran into an issue. When the computer boots, you get the ACER screen.. then it proceeds to the XP screen. Once that shows, the computer glitches and reboots into a boot loop.

I've since installed XP twice again reformatting the hard drive each time to the same end result.

I've found some information regarding blue screen and black screen, but none that seem to be specific to this problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help and support you can give!
 
you might burn a cd or a usb with Hiren's boot cd and see if you can run boot.cfg and fixboot,and fixmbr from the recovery console.

here are the instructions:Courtesy of Jose Ibarra:
Anywho, to make a Hiren's boot CD, do this:

I am going to recommend you use Hiren's boot CD (it will also go on a USB drive).

This is good for you because it has many more tools on it that on the XP Recovery Console CD, does not care about your Administrator passwords and you will not have to futz around in your BIOS if any afflicted system has SATA drives - Hiren's can deal with that.

You will have a whole bunch of cool tools that you don't have in the XP Recovery Console... a registry editor, password resetter, and a desktop that looks like Windows XP so you will feel comfortable maneuvering.

You can also easily copy your personal data (documents, images, music.) to an external drive.

From a working system, first download Hiren's Boot CD from here (it is a substantial download but worth it):

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ (look near the bottom of the page, do not click on any ads).


Unzip the Hiren's to some folder where you can find it. There is a Hiren's.BootCD..iso in there that you are going to need next.

Hiren's has instructions to make a bootable USB that you can use, but it requires you to first burn the .iso to a CD and some other steps, so I suggest another way...

Download RUFUS 1.20 from here (read some stuff on the page so you can know more about it):

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

I will caution you to be careful that you don't accidentally format any of your hard drives - be sure your USB stick is in and know what the drive letter is! This part always makes me a little nervous, so be careful.

Launch RUFUS and all the defaults should be okay, for the Device, choose your USB drive letter, Quick format, FAT32, label it if you want to and in the Format options box, click the little icon that looks like a CD and a window will open. Navigate that dialogue to point to the folder that contains the Hiren's.BootCD.15.iso that you unzipped earlier and the box should change to say ISO image (RUFUS understands the Hiren's ISO file).

Double check you have the right Device selected in the top (NOT you HDD) Click Start, acknowledge the warning and let it finish (it will take a little while) as it copies the files. The Hiren's ISO is also good size.

When RUFUS is done, it will say 'DONE' in the bottom.

Put the USB stick in the afflicted machine and reset/reboot and press whatever key you need to press to get to a boot menu where you can select the USB as the first boot device (that is F11 for me). If you don't see a boot menu choice, you will have to adjust your BIOS to boot from the USB first instead of the HDD.

When the Hiren's menu comes up, choose the Mini XP Mode and it will start loading (slowly from a USB drive) and eventually you should see a Windowsy looking desktop. You should recognize that part and feel comfortable, but it is not your desktop - it is the Hiren's desktop!

Remember: You did not boot on your hard disk - you booted into the Hiren's desktop


http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk
Hiren’s for flash drive
 
Thanks for the reply!

The directions are very in depth, and easy to follow.

I have one question though. Will this actually fix the boot issue, or will I have to run this every time I want to boot the machine up?
 
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