Daughter ran a standard recovery on her Compaq Presario S4000V desktop (which she has done before with no problem), but this time everything goes fine until she gets to the last page (after you've chosen the language & time zone etc.) where it thanks you and has you click on "finish" to get started, then she gets the hour glass and the same page (thank you page) stays there forever!! It eventually moves onto the Windows XP home edition page, "please wait", but again gets stuck. So she restarted it and gets the Windows XP page and then "the system is not fully installed, please run set up again". She's run it from the hard drive and also from the recovery cd's she made, it made no difference.

Welcome to SAF !!

QUOTE

She's run it from the hard drive and also from the recovery cd's she made

Pls explain,

1) does she have the orginal compaq recovery cd's?

2) she run's it from HD....she ran what and from what exactly?

Thanks for the welcome! No recovery cds, it came with "recovery partition" right on the hard drive. Also came with instructions on how to make recovery cds in case she wanted to delete the recovery partition from the hard drive (she did make the cds but never deleted from hard drive). So first she followed instructions for standard recovery using recovery partition on hard drive, when that didn't "finish" she inserted the recovery cd she made, but it didn't get her any farther than the first time. Is that a little clearer for you?

That makes it sound like either the recovery partition had an error when the cd's were made or some hardware is having a problem. Both could cause it to stop at the same spot.

Did she make the recover cd's before she ran a successful recovery or after? If it was made before, I would start to suspect hardware. If it was made after, the partition may have been corrupted and that is why the cd's dont work either. If that is the case, you would need to contact compaq.

Two more questions though:

1. What problem was she having that she needed to do a recovery?
2. What point of the recovery is it stopping? (if it is installing hardware, the component being installed might be the problem. See if it tells you on screen).

It will be slow but have her try the install from DOS, bootup with a win98 boot floppie w/cd in tray, chg to the CD i386 folder and use winnt.exe to install and see what happens...........