[III VoN III]

I am trying to reinstall xp pro sp2 over a previous working installation, and as soon as it gets to the screen where it asks to install the wireless card, and that windows doesn't necessarily approve the device, the keyboard and trackpad stop working.

I have nothing plugged in except the power cable, i waited over an hour, and nothing happened. i have tried four or five times to reboot and nothing seems to work. I also tried a USB mouse, but the ports seem to be getting no power.

I am officially clueless as to how to fix this problem. The reason I had to try a recovery was something to do with the activation in xp. I think that the wpa file was corrupt, or perhaps was deleted, but when i previously tried to boot into xp, it said, "you must activate" and then i hit yes, and it said "windows is already activated", then it would log me out.

any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks,
dave

[ghporter]

Use the Disk Utility (in OS X) to delete the Windows partition and start over with a fresh installation. It sounds very much like one of the subsystems-probably the USB subsystem-didn't get properly installed.

Don't feel too bad-this happens in PC installations more often than the users would like. I've reinstalled TWICE to fix a similar problem and wound up getting my install disc replaced because IT was the problem!

Oh, and WELCOME to the MacNN Forums!

[III VoN III]

thanks for your help.

is there really no other way? I have so many things installed on it, so many files ... i really can't afford to reinstall the whole thing. i guess if that's how it has to be... thanks again,
dave

[ghporter]

If your previous reinstall attempts didn't work, there's something seriously wrong with the way XP is already installed. One thing you might try is using XP's Recovery Console, which you get to during the startup phase the install disc goes through. It's not for the faint of heart-you need some pretty strong command line skills to work this.

You should back up your data files to some other medium, but don't bother with the programs since you'll have to reinstall them anyway.

[III VoN III]

do you know of any good tutorials on the recovery console? I am fine using the command line for anything. i just dont know a good place to learn specific commands...

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Originally Posted by dvmorris

do you know of any good tutorials on the recovery console? I am fine using the command line for anything. i just dont know a good place to learn specific commands...

same here.... it's good stuff to know....

[ghporter]

Here's one that can get you started. Here's another that may help with your specific problem, dvmorris.

Unfortunately, the Recovery Console is just so much black magic to most users-if they know what it is at all-so there aren't a lot of user-level resources for it around. In many cases (see the second link) it is necessary to konw what's hosed up to use the Console to fix it. I tend to use a Knoppix LiveCD to fix Windows issues because it's got a GUI, it can see the whole file system-including an NTFS system, and it's pretty safe (for example, you have to work at it a bit before you can get write access to anything.)

I hope this helps.