A friend if mine's laptop has been playing up and stupidly she thought I could fix it. On switching it on it would power up and suggest performing a repair. After carrying out the repair and rebooting it just returned to the repair suggestion. A useless circle.

Therefore I simply booted the original Vista disk and reinstalled it. The installation worked fine and the laptop now loads Windows. However, it would appear that little or none of the original drivers are now installed. I would go online to download them but the network driver to connect to the Internet has not been installed. It seems like I'm stuck. I've tried loading the original driver disk and installing them from there but none of the options seem relevent. I've installed them all from the disk anyway, just in case it worked. No luck.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

By the way, it's a Dell Inspiron 1525 running Vista Home Basic 32bit.

+ http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/dr...l=en&catid=&impid=

Or use the DVD which came with the laptop.

Thanks for the help - everything seems to he running smoothly now. However, there is one issue with Windows Media Player and DVDs.

When I try and play a DVD I get the following message:

'Windows Media Player cannot play DVD video. You might need to adjust your Windows display settings. Open display settings in Control Panel, and then try lowering your screen resolution and color quality settings.'

I've tried doing as suggested but no luck. I've Googled the message and looked for help but most advice suggests installing an mpeg 2 codec - which I have done. This hasn't worked either.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Try in another player such as VLC.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_klite_mega_codec/

Thanks, this worked.

However. Another problem!!

Having sorted out the laptop and returned it to my friend she has had it for a week or so. She has returned it to me with a new problem.  Whenever the laptop is switxhed on it simply says:

'A disk error ocurred. Press ctrl alt del to restart.'

It won't even allow me to start in safe mode or boot setup. I'm pretty stuck with what to do so any help would be great.

Make sure the harddisk cable is connected properly and the boot order in the BIOS is correct (if the disk doesn't show up in BOS after you reconnected cable it might be dead).

If those don't help, boot from a Windows installation disc and choose repair, she might have messed up the Windows installation.