Boot disks won't complete without Eula

[Pauline Mari]

I am attempting to install the 6 Windows XP SP1 Home Edition boot disks that I downloaded from the Microsoft's site . All goes along well until disk 6 finishs. I get a message saying it can't find my end user agreement (Eula) hit F3 to end. The agreement must have crashed with the system or the boot can't find it. How do I work around this? I'd really appreciate any help you can give me.

 

[Dan O]

What are you trying to accomplish using it?

As there may be another option to accomplish it.

 

[Pauline Mari]

Thank you Dan O for your response to my problem. I posted an earlier post yesterday regarding the same computer. In answer to your question I am trying to accomplish getting back in to windows first and then hopefully backing up my 29+ gigabytes of data that I can't get to and then hopefully getting to a restore point so everything is as it use to be. If I have lost all of my data I would settle for just getting windows up and running again.

We purchased the computer new 13 months ago. It came with XP pre-installed and no XP CD to fall back on. I had no problems with the computer other then the normal XP rejection of trying to install some printers etc. The changes I have made in the last month are: Added a firewire card (no problems); added a tv card (no problems) and then downloaded windows media player 9.0 from Microsoft's site. When it came to installing the driver the instructions say that the driver is more stable then XP's driver so it is safe to download. I did so and the player worked great. The computer had done a restore point before installing the player.

When I rebooted the computer after downloading the media player I saw the HP logo screen and then a grey screen with white blocks across the bottom. Kind of resembles a short wide bar code. The computer works away for a couple of minutes and then a message comes up that says: Windows could not start because of an error in the software. Please report this problem as: load needed DLLs for Kernel. Please contact your support person to report this problem.

I can not get to a C prompt using a start-up disk. If I put an old dos game in drive A it works fine. I have video and sound and all works well.

I tried setting the bios back to default setting. That didn't help.

Tried safe mode. Can't get to safe mode. Ends with the same error as before.

Last week I purchased another new HP with Windows XP Home Edition so if there are any files that I need I would have access to them. Does that help me any? (Unfortunately this one came pre-installed also with no WP CD).

Any help you or anyone else could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again Dan.

 

[dvk01]

You should be able to prss F8 on boot and when the help screen comes up select recovery console, then repair

If you have no XP cd then HP should have put a copy of the cd on a hidden partition and recovry console will find it and repair the installation

 

[Pauline Mari]

Good idea. Unfortunately, F8 doesn't get that far to have the option of choosing recovery console.

But I do appreciate a response to my plea for help.

 

[JohnWill]

It may be time to obtain a CD from a friend and try an repair installation.

FWIW, doesn't the HP come with a recovery partition? If so, you should be able to restore it to the sorry state it was in when you bought it with the recovery boot disk.

Also, if you Cruise over to Systernals, they have an NTFS DOS read-only driver. This allows you to use a boot disk and access the files on an NTFS volume. You could also boot up an imaging program like GHOST and do a network backup of the entire drive image so you could later recover your files.

Finally, you could remove the hard disk and temporarily install it into the new machine and access the files that way, then reload Windows on the old machine.

In closing, this is one of the many reasons I don't buy or recommend most brand name PC's, they cut corners and make it practically impossible to recover from problems like this!