packard bell help pc

melttc

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guys

my brothers pc went funny on ;him so he decided to format it but it has two partitions one is 2mb and the c: drive but ive tried deleting partion and installing xp again but when it does its thing it just reboots and says error loading operating system then thats as far asa we can get.
i think there is hidden bit of the drive somewhere as it was a boughrt packard bell but because ive had no experience with bought machines im at a blank!

please help
 
I am wondering if the PC is confused about which one is the boot partition.

When you install XP, delete all the existing partitions including the 2mb one.
 
Nothing wrong with them as PC it's probably as oneman is saying the PC is confused somehow as to which partition it boots to. The 2Mb partition is probably the recovery utility.

Do yourself a favour and download Hiren's BootCD from the link and use one of the partition utilities to look at the drive.

Download Hiren's BootCD

You might find that the 2Mb partition hasnow become the 1st one and that could be why the PC is trying to boot to it. Anyway you could dlete them all if you want and start afresh, but there is no need. Format the drive whichever way you want and then do yourself a favour, forget XP and put Windows 7 on it. It is much better. If you don't have W7 then you can find it on here.

Let us know if you need more help and how you get on.
 
most likely an unrecognised boot sector at the beginning of the partition
strange this as xp installs the boot sector as standard at the beginning of the partition and the computer should boot up no problem

you sure you have enabled it in bios to boot up off that hard drive [c:]

having a spare 2mb that is partitioned should make no difference to whether it will boot up

the other problem u might have is that Dell use their own bios's like PB and they require specific versions of xp to be able to be compatible i.e boot sector & Boot.ini

NTLDR Ntdetect.com

however i would go with the above and try and completely fdisk the drive and create a fresh ntfs partition using 100% of the drive space
 
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