Soo… i pop everything into the new computer and her old XP install doesn’t boot. I’m not SUPER suprised, so I put in the XP cd and go to the “repair” option on the boot menu… it goes to install XP, and it hangs in the middle of the installation 3 or 4 times in a row.
It hangs during the “installing devices” part of the install, right after the screen flashes blank and then comes back, everythign freezes, i can’t move the mouse.
Now, I ran memtest86 and some hard drive tests before I bought this stuff (this hardware is a cheap upgrade attempt to escape some gremlins in her old system), so I am fairly confident that these work fine.
What do I do now? I have a slipstreamed XP Pro SP1 disk at work, maybe I can try installing from there.
Would reformatting the HDD help at all? I wouldn’t think it would be any more effective than an XP “repair”, but what do I know. I mean, I’m sure the reformat is more STABLE, but the repair should at least install, right?
What kind of video card is in the system? Certain cards (Nvidia in particular) are notorious for causing this problem. Installing a different card may take care of the problem, and you can add the other card back when the OS installation is finished.
Try a side-by-side install. Tell it to put it in a folder other than Windows. This has the benefits of a fresh install, but allows you to move stuff over as you get the time or when you need the space.
Ah crap, forgot to mention, the video card is an NVidia GF4 MX 420 PCI.
I’ll try a diff. card, then I’ll try the parallel install. I’m kinda antsy about the “new directory windows install”, because she only has a 13GB drive and it’s already kinda full.
Yeah. The 2nd-repair-option-question-tree installation method detects and replaces the windows xp motherboard drivers. The initial repair option doesn’t do this.
I had a similar problem, and this was the technique that fixed it.
