Can't install Windows, need some suggestions

[Lothar1974]

I am helping my neighbor out, they have a 3 or 4 year old Hp Pavillion Desktop. They said it just wouldn't boot one day out of the blue. I have formatted the drive and tried reinstalling Windows XP Media Center. I get stuck as soon as it loads all the default drivers and etc, right before the Xp Professional setup screen where you have the options to setup windows, repair or quit. (I was able to get past this once by hitting F5 and picking the proper HAL, but after the complete install it froze at the welcome screen and I could not get any further). I have also tried the HP recovery software. It loads completely then asks to reboot. After this reboot it says it has to do a onetime installations of files and to not shutdown and etc. This is where it freezes as well.

Now I have tried several different new hard drives, ran a boot memory scan, cleared the cmos and reset the bios default settings. I have tested the power supply, tried 2 different video cards and several different cdroms as well as different copies of XP. Nothing shows as being bad and I still get stuck at these same 2 spots. I have noticed the light showing processor activity goes inactive when it freezes/stops installing.

Wondering if any one has any further suggestions?

Thanks!!

Jason

 

[mpilchfamily]

Run Memtest and see if the RAM is OK.

 

[bwatson283]

Ya, Memtest.

 

[Lothar1974]

Thanks for the response guys, I have ran memtest alreasdy and there were no errors. I ran it 2 times just to make sure.

 

[Porter21]

Heat problems? CPU primarily?

 

[Gunbuster]

Do you have any goofy extraneous USB devices plugged in?

 

[PurdueRy]

I blame the hard drive. It's given me issues with windows installs before.

 

[TeeJay1952]

Turn off Legacy USB and try again.

 

[alkemyst]

I had this issue more than once...I don't remember my solutions but I think it was removing the unnecessary hardware and installing it after the OS completes.

I wanted to add, not at 39mins (I don't think) but one time this kind of hang was a bad XP disc (OEM for a non-OEM install too will do this I believe).

Pretty insightful post from the net
The 39 min mark is at the start of setup, setup does the following in order:

1 - registers catalogs so it can check digital signature of files
2 - Installs core hardware such as cpu, hard disk, drivers
3 - starts step 1 of 3

So what you're looking at is either 1) corrupt core files, 2) digital signing broken, 3) hardware issues

Upload your setuplog.txt (which shows what setup did), and setupapi.log (which logs hardware detection), and setuperr.log (if you have it). I'll look at the files if you want and tell you what is wrong.

-gosh

 

[Northern Lawn]

When I reformat my OS will freeze for a LONG time but 10 minutes later the HD starts working again and everything is smooth. It does this on Vista and windows 7.