Now I've done it..

[apeo]

I've really screwed up this time, a friend told me to have a look at his laptop when i get a chance so i had a look at it and it did seem buggy. I went through the normal steps of cleaning it up and it still seem buggy so thought doing a windows xp repair would be good idea. Well bad idea cause now when it trying to go through the setup it loads a black screen with just the mouse pointer and nothing else.

 

I get the feeling it has something to do with it being a RM laptop. Any ideas how i sort this out?

[tom_newton]

Get hold of the trinity rescue kit

Mount the drive

Copy stuff off it (cause I bet there's no backup) onto your desktop/any machine with decent disk space

Rebuildinate

[somabc]

Give it back, tell him it was like that when you got it OR boot from Live CD (Ubuntu will work well) and copy any important files to an external disk. Then reinstall windows.

[apeo]

Wouldnt i need an RM XP Recovery CD? As stupid as i am i didnt notice it was an RM laptop till after i decided to do a normal xp repair. How dumb am i to mis all the RM logos.

[RobMongoose]

I may be missing something through inexperience of using any recent RM kit, but should it matter? Any working XP disk should be OK. Try using the hard disk repair tools on some sort of boot CD (such as Hirens) to check that the HDD is OK. Then, as others above have said, back up using something like Ubuntu then reinstall.