Right, got a laptop here from a lad at work - it's his younger brothers Dell Latitude C510/610

Anyway, problem was it wouldn't load into Windows. It has XP Pro on it, and 4 user accounts. 2 personal ones (his two brothers) and two admin accounts (Admin and "User1" - don't know why)

Anyway, it would get to the logon page, you'd click one of the accounts and it just wouldn't load into Windows - just sat there doing fuck all for ages - till you turned it off!

I managed to get into the Admin account in Safemode, and rescued the iTunes contents onto an iPod (in disk mode) then tried to do a restore - couldn't - there was no System Restore option!

Tried booting into "last known good configuration" and that didn't work.

Booted into Admin in safe mode again and deleted all the accounts bar the "User1" admin account and now can boot into that account normally - but it is SLOW AS SHIT, takes ages to do anything. I mean it takes upto 30secs from pressing the Windows key to the start menu opening! Eventually got to the system restore option, there was NOTHING for Feb or March at all so tried one from Jan 5th. Left it to it, came back to be told the restore failed and nothing had been changed

So since iTunes music was the only thing he wants saving, I decided to reinstall it.

Got a copy of Win XP (Home) SP2 that is cracked (so doesn't need a serial) which I know works cos I have it on two computers - but it won't start the install program. Tells me something is corrupted and fails.

Now it won't even boot from the CD (press F12 on bios page and select boot from CD one time boot menu) and it just goes to the "start in safe mode", "start normally" page.

Any idea's? Ideally I'd like to get this copy of XP Home on it all fresh. I have a copy of XP Pro (Dell OEM disc that came with my PC) but the lappy has no license sticker on it.....

 

try the XP pro Dell disk you have, you shouldnt need a serial number with it.

Does it have the diags option in the F12 boot menu? If it has then run that and see if it has any hardware issues.

 

The XP Pro disc, when ran from inside Windows, still asked for a serial. I managed to obtain the serial the (then) current XP Pro install had (using a program to unencrypt it from the registry) and it refused to accept that serial aswell!

So I managed to get it to boot from the Dell XP Pro CD and it went through the whole install set up without asking for a serial, so it's working now