What in gods name is wrong with my PC?, Cant install windows

[qpabani]

Ive tried and tried, this is now my 3rd day of trying to install windows xp on my computer. I recently got a new motherboard/chip/ddr ram, and as soon as i got it running i went and tried to install windows xp on my hard drive, so i could get a fresh start with a new computer/os.

I started up my pc, with the xp cd in and booted from it. However. XP just wont install on my computer! At first, it loads the startup files from cd very quickly, and gets started. Once it started checking the disk the problems start. First, it hangs at 0% for like 10 minutes, then it hangs at 100% for 10 minutes (no numbers in between, probably because the drive was just formatted), then after the status bar goes away it hangs for another 10 minutes with the text "checking drive c:" (but the statusbar has hit 100 and gone away). Then finally, it starts to copy the files from cd. It gest to 6% or so very quickly, but then it slows and reads a few files, stops for 5 mins, reads another few files, stops again. After 2 hours, it finishes copying the files. Then on the first restart, the windows xp logo shows up, with the statusbar. It hangs there for 30 minutes, then finally i get a grey screen, with nothing on. Then it waits there for 30 more minutes, and finally i get a blue screen with "Stop: Unkown hard error".

This is the THIRD day im trying to install xp. Ive tried on three different drives, and 3 different xp cds (2 are ap1 - they freeze when trying to install driver.cab, and tell meit cant read the file from cd - even though theyre two different sp1's downloaded from different sources). The regular xp does what i explained above. I tried it on a FAT32 drive, as well as 2 NTFS drives. ive even formatted/scandisked the drives for errors including a deep scan where it checks all the sectors.

Ive foundthat the installation is burning holes in my hard drives, as when it screws up and i format the drive, there are several more bad sectors then the time before.

I have no idea whats wrong.. I installed windows 98 flawlessly (within 8 minutes) and even when i tried running xp setup from windows 98, it does the same thing when copying the files over (except with a better gui).

This is driving me nuts - ive got extremely important data on 2 of the 3 drives and i cant afford to lose them. Ive got a dummy drive that i use to try and install xp on - even though ive also tried on the other 2 drives.

What in gods name could be wrong?
I have a new AMD XP 2800+ barton chip, an ASUS A7V333 deluxe mb, 512 mb ddr 2700+, 16x10x40 cdrw.

i installed xp with my sisters box on one of my hard drives, i thought i had won the battle, but when i took it out and put it in my box, i got a blue screen with some drive mount volume error.

the 3 drives ive tried are (all brand names, western digital , maxtor, etc):

3gb
20gb
40gb

all 3 of em take SO long just to delete a file off the hard drive. it takes the setup like 10 mins just to examine the drive to see if its there - takes 0.1 seconds on my sisters 800mhz computer, ive got a 2800+ xp

when it makes the directories for windows, it creates a folder, waits 10 seconds then creates the next

its taken me 3 hours just to get the files copied over (if it even gets that far - doesnt matter ill get the grey screen followed by a blue screen if it succeeds anyway) and when i installed xp on my sisters computer it took 20 mins to get thru the copy part.

windows 98 installed in 8 minutes - why is xp being such a pain?


update:
i installed 98 on my fat32 hard drive again, tried copying and pasting hundreds of large files in the os, and i was able to copy everything to another folder flawlessly and fast. the drive doesnt appear to be the problem?

then i copied over my entire xp cd to my hard drive, and started setup.exe. It did the work involved from 64 min remaining to 54 min remaining in one minute. Looks good so far. Then it restarts to actually install it. and it does THE SAME THING AGAIN! All the files are already on my hd (since i copied em over from the cd). But now once its restarted xp decides to use its own satan drivers or something on my hard drive, and now i can hear my hd working (for 1/10th of a second) every 10-15 seconds. The progress bar id expect will reach 100 in 3 hours. when its done, i bet ill get another blue screen.

what the hell?! anyone with any idea at all what im doing wrong here? it says "press f6 to install a 3rd party scsi or raid driver" - i dont think my drive is either of those 2, and i cant find any drivers anyway.

why does 98 work so well and xp doesnt work at all with the drives?


btw i just checked its progress - it says that "xp couldnt create a backup image", "xp could not find the files on the cd, please copy files from cd to hd and restart setup". THE FILES ARE ON THE HARD DRIVE ALREADY - im running setup from my harddrive

does it think my drive is a cdrom or something?

[CMonster]

cpu core voltate low? faulty ram? motherboard? power supply?

Your disk drives may not be faulty, but if the CPU/ram/motherboard/I/O cables are generating errors this can report errors on drives that aren't really errors -check the drives on an known good machine.

[Micro Bean]

Hmm you went through 3 hard drives? and still no go Hve you tried using different memory I think That might be the Problem not ruling it just yet because I had trouble ones with installing winxp with mutiple errors turned out it was my Memory So I would have that memory checked

[qpabani]

everything is brand new - except the hds that work fine on another machine. i installed 98 perfectly - its just xp that wont install and hang repeatedly when working with the drive

[Christian-Comp]

I've got two guesses 1) you've got a bad CD-Rom (this can cause HD problems (TRUST ME - this happened to me).
or 2) you have a bad MOBO.

[thekingofpain]

Is that a retail version of XP?

[RedFury]

I had problems installing Win98 with a bad memory chip, new chip solved the problem. I'd try to run with a different memory chip first.

This is definetely an odd problem. You would think that if XP could install, you'd have no problems.

Have you tried using the NTSC format instead of Fat32?

[nurdonsite2]

ok i think this could solve ur problem. get a program called smartdrv (search google) and follow these steps to install xp. let us know how it goes.

[wallie_x]

My new computer behaved much the same way, during a Win XP clean install. But this was on a ECS K7S7AG mobo. It was bad memory. I used some of my old DDR 2100 Crucial and ran it on an asynchronous FSB 166 CPU & 133 memory, and reinstalled Win XP after reformatting the HD from a DOS based OS. I had to reformat in DOS because Win XP set-up saw the old files (even after Win XP set-up had reformatted the HD) it still saw the old files, thought it was an installed OS, and refused to rewrite over them. It works fine now, even with the newer 333Mhz memory I got back from RMA'ing the old.
Run Memtest 86 on your new memory and I'll bet it'll show errors at stock speed, Or it could be to hot of (or incompatible) BIOS settings.

[Redwolf]

Do what Wallie said and install memtest86:

www.memtest86.com