Posted: 2/29/2008 5:54:46 AM EDT
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I feel dumb for having to ask this, but I'm having problems installing XP on a friend's box. Particularly, it looks like I keep getting incomplete installs (not all the files are copied over, setup does not complete) or corrupted installs (files are copied over incorrectly and/or installed incorrectly). Insofar I've tried three different XP CDs (WinXP with SP2 slipstreamed), two CDROM drives, and two different hard drives, so I doubt it's any of the following: 1: Bad install disk 2: Bad hard disk 3: Bad CD drive I did get one install yesterday that actually got into Windows explorer (the crash normally occurs after POST and initial OS startup). At this point, though, core services started crashing left and right and I had to do a hard reset. What further frustrates me is I installed Win2kPro SP4 on this machine less than a month ago and there were no problems whatsoever with that. The Win2k partition still exists and the machine will boot into Win2k. |
Do you have a straight up copy with just XP on it? You said it ran fine with 2K right? Did you try to upgrade from 2K or clean install? |
I don't have a copy of XP without SP2, but I can probably find one somewhere. Runs just fine with Win2k. One disk is a 30gig and the other is a 15 gig. The Win2k is on a 8 gig FAT32 partition on the 30 gig drive. I've been trying to do a clean install on a separate partition. I've tried both NTFS and FAT32 partitions on both the 15 gig drive and in the unpartitioned space of the 30 gig drive. ETA: Jumpers are set so that the 15 gig drive is the master and the 30 gig is the slave. Ideally, when this is over, the 15 gig will be used for the OS and the 30 gig will be used for data. |
Have you tried installing XP without the other drive connected? Are you wanting to keep 2k on the 30G drive? Why is the 2k on FAT instead of NTFS? Have both disks been connected each time you tried installing XP? |
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A lot of the XP versions I've used (warez and other) are very tweaky about being installed on a partition. ALL of the warez versions I have tried, in fact, seemed to require installation on a totally formatted drive. If you have an unused drive laying around, you might try formatting it, then installing to it, to eliminate the possibility of it being a hardware issue. I have also run into issues with crappy/cheap/damaged IDE cables inducing a similar problem. |
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Okay, if you don't have a bench box to do a thorough formatting, you are kind of stuck with your thumbdrive method. (That is why my scrounge builds still have floppys. ) Anyhow, I buy IDE cables at a local college surplus for cents on the dollar, so I don't hesitate to chuck them if I suspect they are bad. Good luck, keep us updated. |
I contacted the friend who owns the box. I told him to buy some new IDE cables. We'll see what happens. |
Closure in this post.
So, it looks like one of the three 512 sticks was bad. I think that one of the install disks was also scratched. The CD drive and IDE cables may or may not have had anything to do with it, but they were replaced anyways. |