I have a HP 4150 laptop with a 10Gig HD, and 128 Meg of RAM, & Pentium II processor. It came with Windows NT, and worked just great.......That is until my son installed (or tried to) Windows XP. Now the computer just hangs up on the "Activation Screen" and when you choose to activate, an ERROR message stating "not enough quota to process..." So I cant even log into windows because it hasn't been activated.

I have even tried to reinstall windows NT, but cannot do it, because I'm told I am trying to install an "older Version" so setup is being cancelled.

My question is this. Is there anyway to reformat the hard drive? Unfortunately I do not have the original 3.25" setup disks, or CD, as I bought this laptop used. I am in dire need of this unit, as my wife is going to use it in her Midwifery classes.

Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated.Travel to bootdisk.com and DLoad the WinME bootdisk...
Use that file to create a bootable floppy to access the machine and format the drive.
You should then be able to re-install your original OS on there...

P.S. How are you going to re-install WinNT on it WITHOUT the CD ? ?Thanks Patio: ..I'll Try that.

I have my original copy of windows NT. I just didn't have the original SET-up discs for the HP. (figuring I'd be able to reformat off of those if I had them)

It just that every time I tried to re-install using the NT CD, I got the error of trying to install the "older Version." OK.. I downloaded the ME Boot disc from bootdisk.com. Had to burn it to cd in order to boot up up because this laptop has removable drives, and when run off a 3.25 disk it couldn't find the cdrom drive.

Booted up..everything seemed fine..I started system in safe mode w/command prompt, when I tried to do a fidisk/format for C: drive, a message saying "Incorrect MS-DOS Version" comes up.

Question: Can I burn the "correct" version on cd and then load it, and reformat C:? And if so, what is the correct version. At this point I'm almost willing to ake the hard drive out of the laptop, and run an electromagnet over it just to "scramble" its brains enough to allow a re-install.

Again, any help or direction would be highly appreciated. Well you could try the 4 disk set for NT from the same site...
The other way you could do it is to remove the drive.



Then grab one of these for about 10 bucks from a computer store...2.5" to IDE connector.
This will allow you to connect the drive to an IDE cable in a DESKTOP machine and you should then be able to format it using Disk Management.

You may also want to start collecting all the drivers for that laptop from the manuf. site before going any further...they will need to be re-installed after the NT install.