Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

In your situation, I would try this:

1. With XP still installed on your computer, put your brother's DVD player that installed and runs XP just fine into your computer. Restart your PC. See if that works OK. This is mostly just for information purposes.

2. With your brother's DVD player still in the drive, obliterate everything on your hard drive and then install XP. (Or, install 98 and have your XP disc kill it and then install itself.)

3. You know his DVD player successfully installed XP, so if you're getting the same problem that you had with his hardware and CD, then the culprit is likely the motherboard/BIOS/whatever.

4. If everything is cool then put your old DVD drive in and see what happens. (I'd probably recommend putting in the XP service pack before this, but I don't know if you can connect to Microsoft's site and grab it with your copy of XP.) Anyway, if the problem comes back then see if there are any firmware updates for your problematic DVD drive. That probably won't solve anything even if there is one, so get yourself a new DVD drive and eBay off the old one. Mwave is selling a Lite-On for under $40... $42 if you choose the edgy, black faceplate!! I have bought a number of these for those people that I have built computers for, mainly because of Lite-On's attitude towards copy protection schemes, and installed this drive successfully on all shapes, sizes and flavors of XP, both legitimate and not-so-much, if you're digging my ditch, and I think you are.

5. If you do not wish to get a new DVD-ROM drive and your brother's works in yours, then see if your problematic one works in your brother's PC. If his works in yours and yours works in his then maybe you can get by with that arrangement or something. Doesn't exactly explain what got fucked or how it did, though.



the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!