A friend of mine was trying to uninstall the ATI Rage 3d Tweak/Overclocking program. He went to add/remove programs, removed what he believed to be the utility, and everything went to hell.
The computer was restarted and froze at the loading Windows XP Professional screen. It was a hard crash, and he left it for more than an hour. First he tried booting to safe mode and it froze at the same loading screen.
The next thing he tried was a repair installation of XP. He booted from an XP CD, went for a repair installation, and all the install files copied from the CD to hard drive without a problem. Restart, and then the installation loads itself from the harddrive and seemed to work for a while. Whenever it hit the "39 minutes remaining" phase, the installation hangs. The animated graphic in the bottom right continues animating, but the installation doesn't progess any further. A second repair installation also failed. Instead of installing windows for a while, it immediately went to the 39 minutes remaining hang.
He has his drives cleverly partitioned into C:, for windows, D: and G: are applications. Then, he did a hard format of the C: drive and started installing XP. It now finished copying files from disk, and then immediately goes to the 39 minutes remaining screen.
A repair installation now gives the error "Setup cannot set the required Windows XP configuration information. This indicates an internal setup error. Contact your system administrator." The only site I found with any info about this problem is here.
We opened the case, all of the hardware is set correctly, RAM modules are all the way in and all cables are appropriately plugged in.
Any ideas?
The computer was restarted and froze at the loading Windows XP Professional screen. It was a hard crash, and he left it for more than an hour. First he tried booting to safe mode and it froze at the same loading screen.
The next thing he tried was a repair installation of XP. He booted from an XP CD, went for a repair installation, and all the install files copied from the CD to hard drive without a problem. Restart, and then the installation loads itself from the harddrive and seemed to work for a while. Whenever it hit the "39 minutes remaining" phase, the installation hangs. The animated graphic in the bottom right continues animating, but the installation doesn't progess any further. A second repair installation also failed. Instead of installing windows for a while, it immediately went to the 39 minutes remaining hang.
He has his drives cleverly partitioned into C:, for windows, D: and G: are applications. Then, he did a hard format of the C: drive and started installing XP. It now finished copying files from disk, and then immediately goes to the 39 minutes remaining screen.
A repair installation now gives the error "Setup cannot set the required Windows XP configuration information. This indicates an internal setup error. Contact your system administrator." The only site I found with any info about this problem is here.
We opened the case, all of the hardware is set correctly, RAM modules are all the way in and all cables are appropriately plugged in.
Any ideas?
