Ponch

Is it possible that you got a new battery because... the previous one was not charging ? Or can you see a different behavior with the old one ?

And how would it ask for a password if there is none ? Invent one ? AFAIK, there was never any change in the way XP behaves on this matter. If you don't set a password for "administrator", there is none.

Is your "Windows XP Pro SP3" disc an original ? +Please attach (not paste) your "Last session.ini" file that you can find in the resulting folder.

Fyi, as reported by othe people and myself, the freezer trick does work. The fact it works in some cases only doesn't mean its just voodoo tales from people that have no idea what they are doing. Anyone knowing about electronics knows that a cooled component does behave differently from a hot component. If you lower the start temperature of the board enough (I agree people who tell you "it needs two days" have no idea what they are doing), you can in certain cases get a failing drive to work a few minutes longer. What I had is a drive failing after 30 seconds, thus totally unusable, these were my specific symptoms, the drive would not even be recognized by Bios at a 2nd consecutive boot. Then after an hour in the freezer, it failed after about 5 minutes, just enough for me to pick up some files I needed. This is not a fairy tale I invented so I'd look ... cool B) . Key words here are "in some cases".

It's not an nLite specific problem, it's an MS problem, so here also you risk a big waste of time. As for copying files from the install cd to the hard drive, check this link.

You need a real Microsoft XP installation disc, not any "recovery" disc will do. Clearly here, nLite doesn't find what it's looking for. Also if you intend to slipstream SP3, you'll need to run nLite under XP.

The nLite forum is full of threads titled "how do I create a fully up to date cd ?".

I'm sure we'had that one already, but I can't remember how how/if it was solved. Check that your partition is active. edit: found some (problem is "usb" is 3 letters you can't search on that)

Glad my "plainly wrong" answer from 3 days ago helped you.

I have the one linked here (but the 1.1.6 from december 2009). Link is dead but PM me and I'll mail it (~13MB).

He might have implied it but he did not say. Therefor it is not a repeat. Depending on the tool you use to create a partition, formatting it is not always an "obvious 2nd step".

I did. This was just a quick example that worked for me and I made it as short as possible. If you prefer him to wait (at the command line) for your instructions, fine with me.

1) copy the file GRLDR to the root of your active partition. 2) in boot.ini, add in [operating systems] list, the line C:\grldr="Grub4Dos" 3) yes I believe there is a 3)...also create a text file in the root of the active partition, rename it "menu.lst" and have it contain this: timeout 1 title Boot CD/DVD cdrom --init map --hook chainloader (cd0) rootnoverify (cd0) You might have to retry booting if "device is not ready".

from post #11 it seems clear the device is fine, because if I understand, he then just removed the HDD from the boot order, not from the installed devices, so both devices can coexist in peace. As well, once booted from HDD, the OS reads the optical disc fine. Permanent workaround would be to use Grub4dos on an (old/cheap/small) USB drive for the occasional cd boot, via USB. That computer is ~2005~ish and surely boots USB.

Is the flashdrive bought in a shop or on eBay ?

Sorry I missed the fact it was a laptop. On a laptop it is very rare that any device is set differently than master (you usually have 1 HDD as master on channel1 and 1 optical drive as master on channel2). Does it take longer to start Windows when the DVD is set to boot first ? (in other words, does it try to boot DVD but decide it's unbootable and switches to next device?)

Have you checked if the jumper on your new drive are set as it was on the old one ? (Master/Slave/CableSelect/Single) ?

One thing you might already have found out: we should have wroten "create partitions and format them before".

I confirm. +get your drive letters right If you're playing with 2 HDDs or mixing primary and extended partitions.

How have you done 3- ? What have you tried so far ?

You can search the forums for "create recovery" in threads titles, you'll find a whole page of them. One is last answered by Jaclaz with (surprise ) a ton of links to other threads as well. You might notice that your own (this very) thread does not come in the results... so you should check forum rule 12 and edit your 1st post to help other members. Note that you'll have to boot something in order to achieve what you want.

Click the link in the 3rd post, extract "fixpath.exe" from the downloaded zip file, extract it to (for instance) c:\temp\ , then double-click it or from a command line type "C:\temp\fixpath.exe" without the quotes. Then reboot and retry.

I'd recommend Toshiba above Acer anytime. Especially if you plan to use it more than 2 years.

From what I read OE6, included in XP, is the last version, with only minor updates in XP's SP2 and SP3, not anymore in further versions of IE, like...10 years ago . As Tripredacus pointed out, what should have been OE7 is Windows Mail.

Not that I kwow. I doubt editing the registry (replace all "windows.0") would be enough. You can try renaming C:\windows and see if everything runs fine (before deleting it and keep running on C:\Windows.0\ ) or reinstall XP (after formatting the drive this time). Note that this has nothing to do with nLite.