"Inaccessible boot device" message when tried to upgrade from Win2K to XP

Hi
I have a Compaq Armada E500 Laptop running Win 2000 Pro, 128MB of RAM and about a 600Mhz processor, with about 10GB of free hard drive space. Running fine, always kept virus free with anti virus software etc.

Then, I tried to upgrade my Win2000 o/s to XP Pro using a Win XP Pro CD.
The upgrade process starts OK. I get the Win XP installation start menu which takes me through a couple of steps such as Gathering Information, Dynamic Update. At the Preparing Installation step, it stops and I get a screen that says:

"Setup was unable to verify drive c:
Your computer may not have enough memory to examine the drives, or your Windows XP CD may contain some corrupted files.
To continue press enter "
I press enter and I see in the bar at the bottom of the screen that files are being deleted very fast.
"Then another screen appears saying
"Setup cannot access the CD containing the windows XP installation files. To retry press enter, if you are not successful after several tries, quit Setup. Then to restart Setup, copy Windows installation files t oyour hard disk.
To quit Setup, press F3 "
After a couple of retries, I F3 to quit and it says XP is not completely set up. If you quit setup now, you will need to run Setup again to set up Win XP, enter or quit.

when I Quit (F3) it reboots and asks me to choose:
1) Windows 2000 Professional (the old O/s) or
2) Windows XP Professional Setup.

If I choose 2, it just gets me right back where I started as above.
If I choose 1, then I get the blue screen of death saying
****STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF741F84C, xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
ETC Check for viruses on your computer, Remove newly installed hard drives or hd controllers. Check your hd to make sure it is properly config'd and terminated
Run CHKDSK /F to check for hd corruption, then restarte computer

The problem now is I can't even get back to my previous Win2000 Pro O/s

I know the hard drive is fine because I have a Linux O/S called Knoppix that boots and runs off the CD drive and when I run Knoppix I can see the hard drive content and I can call up all my files from the hard drive using Knoppix's own applications. But I can't get Windows to boot up any more.

Any ideas what I should do?
Thanks
Pete

 

You should have a recovery CD, or can get one from Compaq. Your notebook is too slow to be useful for XP, so don't waste money on memory. XP might run but you won't be happy with it's performance without at least a 1000MHz processor.