I want to reformat my hard drive

[mike0liver]

Hi Steve:

Yes, the discs are proper Microsoft disks with product key and hologram and they all seem to behave properly when I do a test run on my desktop PC. What you show is precisely what I saw when I installed Windows XP (except mine is XP Pro) on my desktop PCs. It does not run like this on my laptop (notebook) - see my reply to Snowhog. This is what I long to see and what I expected. It just doesn't happen :-(

I was sort of hoping there might be some way of re-formatting my hard drive so I am sure it's clean but it appears not.

Cheers,
Mike

[SteveRiley]

Take a photograph of the blue screen so I can see what's causing the crash.

[dibl]

The NB100 has no optical drive, right? How are you connecting your Windows installation media to it? If you're using a USB connection to an optical drive, I wonder if that's involved with the problem. Unfortunately, with the MS GWA scam, you can't pull the hard drive and do the installation on a computer with an optical drive, and then put your notebook back together, like you can with Linux. Possibly one of the "windows on usb drive" techniques could work.

[mike0liver]

Steve Riley: Unfortunately, I removed the Linux partitions as part of my attempts to resolve the issue, so I can't show you a screen dump. I may re-install Linux just so I can use the machine on my travels and, if so, I'll do a screen dump.

dibl: That's right, the NB100 has no optical drive and I was using an external one attached by USB. I was speaking to someone who recommended putting the notebook's hard drive into a USB cradle and re-formatting it from my desktop PC. Problem is, the hard drive is a pig to access physically and I''m loath to start delving inside in case I screw something up - I'm not in any way technical and, as things stand, I can at least use the machine with Linux on board - just not for the purpose I intended.

Thank you both for your interest.

Cheers,

Mike