Windows installation problem

[Disco Dan]

Hey guys, I have a problem I need some assistance with.

Id say im fairly damn competent with computer troubleshooting... so only real techies apply

Anyways, my system has been prone to crashing randomly - couldnt find any problem, so ran windows xp disk and low and behold the option to repair the installation appears (not the recovery console)

So I let the installation run and it gets to the point where it reboots for the first time, Then the blue screen appears with 'windows setup is restarting....' - nothing untoward there. After it carrys on the installation it get to the point where a little green bar 3/4 full appears saying 'installing devices', with 33 minutes remaining. Problem is, its just sitting there, and doesnt move for hours.

After numorous attempts to cancel/finish installation and failing, and not finding anything in the bios to avert things, i decided to reset the bios by momentarily removing the battery and re-installing it.

Now when I boot it comes up with 'windows xp home edition' loading screen, then the 'setup is restarting screen, then a blank black screen just with a cursor - and it automatically reboots again and again and I cant break it out of the cycle...

So any ideas peeps... much appreciated... im at a complete loss of ideas here - I cant boot from another disk or anything...

I still think one of your PCI cards or your RAM is the problem... as others have said, remove all your cards and give it another go.. still have problems then stick a known working stick of RAM in and take yours out.

If it still doesnt work..... ....go get some leather undies and get a Mac

[Delphinus]

If you're really keen, copy the i386 directory from xp cd onto a fat32 partition on your hard drive, (or memstick if you have a big enough one) then go without the cdrom as well. (have had problems with them before)

Boot off a usb memory stick into dos and run smartdrv.exe (makes the install fast instead of slow as in 6 hours slow) then from the i386 directory run winnt.exe

You may have to download startdrv.... and install himem.sys etc etc (config.sys dos stuff)
Clear as mud? It is possible. Used to do it alot on school machines that dont have cdrom drives.

[Delphinus]

still have problems then stick a known working stick of RAM in and take yours out.

Just use memtest (link above)

Its easy and fast and first thing you should do.
1- Download 3mb iso and burn to cd.
2 - Boot off cd
3 - ???
4 - Proft

ummm whoops... I mean:
3 - have coffee/go for ride for an hour
4 - Come back... if its failed you'll see stuff.. if not pass will be a value > 0

[Sam I Am]

What a load of crap. I've had plenty of problems with Macs, PCs and Suns.

Go away with your fanboy rubbish. When you mature you'll realise that the OS isn't really that important. It's the person controlling the computer that matters.

not a fanboy it just seems to work for me. always lost on a pc and there drivers.

[Street Gerbil]

Do you have an onboard promise RAID controller? Google "promise raid", download the image and write it on a floppy. Then start the installation and hit F6 when setup asks for additional devices (in the very beginning, right after the first reboot).
Hope that helps.

[Morcs]

Okay, thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

I removed all pci cards - but not ram, will try that.

I did change the boot devices in the BIOS to try to stop it looking for cd - to finish the installation i should get it to do the opposite...

I have a secondary hard drive - it has most of my important shit on it but am not prepared to lose all of my music and movies again... I cant install another OS onto it - or boot off any other disk for that matter as its locked into doing the xp install.

For the same reasons I cant format without putting the HD into another machine.

Worst comes to worse Ill whip the hardrive out and ask Disco to look after my files whilst I do a clean install

[ManDownUnder]

Hardware or firmware issue.

Here's what is probably happening (in my limited experience)...

Somethings conflicting, not performing or not responding nicely causing the boot sequence. An address i being called for the next instruction in the boot sequence and the HDD isn't responding faster than the... RAM or NIC or whatever so the response puts poos in the startup ointment.

Once the infection is started... it all turns to custard rather quickly.

Question... What changed? (Something DID). "I don't know" is a correct answer, but "nothing" is not. If you have added, swapped or changed any hardware or firmware, or layer in an upgrade of some sort - undo what you did and try again from that point.

Hopefully the OS is not deep fried which means you'll need to start over anyway. But even if you do (and let's face it - it IS likely) you'll need to get ride of the cause of the problem before that reinstall will work.

Re MAC vs Windows... *yawn*. Each to their own.

Honoda vs Kawa vs Suzuki vs Yamaha etc - same argument. Long and fun over a few beers but really containing little enduring substance at the end of the day.

[Lias]

Riffers spot on there. Bloody fanboi's (Mac, Windows, *nix etc)

I'd start by pulling as many devices as possible (right down to the bare minimum of ram, hdd and optical drive) and see if it continues on and finishes the install.
Personally, I've never had any problems with doing a repair install. It's much better than reinstalling every single piece of software that I need/want all over again.

What he said.. and we used to have entirely too much experiecng troubleshooting wierd arse issues :-P

[Gremlin]

so ran windows xp disk and low and behold the option to repair the installation appears (not the recovery console)

this option will always appear when an existing OS is detected.

Starting at the beginning, your PC was unstable, well, thats a minefield, without testing it, its unknown what could be the cause (and the list is very long). Re-setting the BIOS, depends if you set it back up again, and it depends what brand mobo, other factors such as the presence of RAID, etc.

Your install is broken. Its lost, troubleshooting it, from a tech point of view (cost v success ratio) is not worth it. Plug the drive into another PC, wipe the partition off the disk, and do another install, fully formatting the drive in the process.

Installs. You can have random installs that are crap. It happens. You fix by installing a fresh copy. Issues you can (or have) run into can include things such as a bad OS disk, it could be a brand of CD the drive doesn't like reading (Mitsubishi disks are in that category), or optical drive could be bad.

If you are working with trusted hardware (and this may require testing - ram, hdd) then a fresh install should work, if you use a OS disk you know works, etc.

Let us know how you go.

[Morcs]

My Hardware is all relatively new - mixed with 2 old hdd's... and an underpowered psu.

Does anyone have a 60gb harddrive that i can buy?

[Zapf]

My Hardware is all relatively new - mixed with 2 old hdd's... and an underpowered psu.

Does anyone have a 60gb harddrive that i can buy?

and an underpowered psu. that could be your problem

I have some 40Gb's (from memory). You want to buy them? good working condition.

[jonbuoy]

Do a google for Bart OS - its a working bootable OS and can read/write to NTFS. You'll need a PC with working windows and a CD burner and your original XP install CD. Its free and handy for recovering data and testing hardware even if hard drive is stuffed you can check the rest works. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

[Scouse]

Sounds to me like you tried to run the windows disc while you had a antivirus program running in the background you must allways disable any antivirus programs while running your windows disc

[Toaster]

I just left the windows to the builder. He did a great job.

[Squiggles]

You mention previous crashes, what was happening at the time? stressing the computer?


Have had similar issues, i did have a faulty stick of ram, crashed every so often, stalled installs etc...

Im an IT techie (albeit on Macs but i can do pc's too). Can grab an external HDD from work for backup purposes.... though, at $120 for 320GB a new one goes along way if you're into collecting movies

Also have a spare stick of ram for testing...
Otherwise theres Memtest, the ram testing tool: http://www.memtest86.com/ Just boot from a floppy and let that run, good way to check its ram but its not always right (mostly is though)

pm if ya need help