System Restore XP

[brostephen]

Hello All,

My wife's emachines (T3065) pc seems to have officially died. I have the restore CDs in which I have been trying to restore the XP Operating System.

Mscdex.exe says it is already running
CDR101 says Not ready reading drive R.....any suggestions?

[PCReviewer]

Hello, it appears that you are trying to reformat.

If that is the case, put your Windows XP CD into the CD-ROM.
Restart your computer.
Enter the bios :When the system menu apears, press Esc, F1, or whatever it says to press
Navigate to where you select "boot to CD-Rom" first, before "boot to hard drive"

from there, save the bios, restart your computer, and the reformat will commence. You will want to erase your partitions, and create a new partition to install on. from there, you will have a brand new install of Windows XP on your computer.

if you have any further questions, go ahead and ask

[Paul Komski]

My wife's emachines (T3065) pc seems to have officially died.
Can you give some more details as to what has happened and what happens when you try to boot to Windows? Maybe that is at least in part why the restore CD is not functioning as it should.

After you get the message about mscdex are you at a DOS prompt?

Since this message comes from the CD itself the PC must be booting to the floppy-emulation part of the CD but it appears it cannot see or read its CD portion. That implies that the CD is probably corrupt or dirty/scratched (try polishing it) or possibly there is an iffy CDROM drive. That being the case the options would be to order replacement CDs from eMachines or try a clean install using a borrowed Windows XP CD from someone; use the same version as the product key ID which should be on the side of the machine.

If there were some way of getting Windows running again, even in Safe Mode, it might also be possible to initiate a restore from an option in the Start Menu if there is a recovery partition still in existence on the hard drive.