Could RAM gone bad, or a bad CD cause lockups in Win98SE install?

[TP]

I tried to help out a friend with computer probs. He has an old Compaq Presario 166mhz machine. He had been using it to play games mostly and then it started having lockup probs.

I tried to help, and noticed some odd things with how the partitions were set up, etc...So I scrubbed the drive and tried to install WIN98se. I could get through setup until the last part and I would start getting weird registry failure and error messages and it would lock up.

I began troubleshooting and pretty much elimated everything except the ram, and the actual windows 98 CD. I tried different hard drives, CD-Rom Drives, etc....

With varying hardware between 2 different computers and miscleaneous parts, and the RAM and 98 CD being the only things I kept the same (cuz it was all I had), I would get error messages and lockups at the same point towards the end of WIN98SE install...It was 2 sticks of 32mb edo ram...

I ran out of time because I was visiting him from out of state, and we didnt have the money or time to try different RAM, and I didnt have another copy of Windows or any other OS's available...

Its a long shot I know posting this question here, but the problem has been lingering in the back of my mind for weeks now, so I thought I'd see if anyone would offer opinion based on what Ive shared...

Thanks

 

[Double Trouble]

First thing you could do would be to first copy the win98 directory from the cd to the hard drive, and install from there. That would allow you to figure out if the cd is bad or not.

From what you posted, it would seem like one of the memory sticks is toast.

One thing though, on that compaq, there's a small partition at the beginning of the hard drive that's used to store the bios information for the machine (I don't know why compaq uses this insane way of doing it). Don't blow away that small partition or you'll have all sorts of problems. If you killed that partition, you can download some disks from compaq that will recreate it for ya....

 

[TP]

I didnt know you could copy the cd onto the drive when no OS is on it...I shouldve tried that.

I did delete the small partition..but it didnt seem there was any important data on it..(Which may explain why it was running bad in the first place)..But it doesnt explain why I had the same problem on the other machine...(It wasnt a Compaq, but it was EDO compatible)...

 

[randypj]

I'm with tagej. I vote for bad RAM. I had the same thing happen and spent 2 weeks troubleshooting the bleeder. What finally clued me into it was that it would run scandisk in DOS, but lockup from Windows. Actually, I did get Win95b loaded a few times, but, couldn't load any other programs. Turned out to be a bad 32MB DIMM.
--Randy