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Need help.. a PC problem that is beyond reason

M

MDesigner

Platinum Member
So here's the deal. My cousin & I decided to have our own LAN party and hook up our two computers. He just bought WinXP Home (OEM) and brought it with him so we could install it on his system.

So, I did a clean format, and began installation. The first stage of installation takes place on the blue setup screen. Everything runs fine until a file comes up that it says it can't copy. I can retry or skip. I hit enter to retry and it works. This happens on a couple more files. Then it's time to reboot.

It boots and goes into the latter half of the installation, where it shows "Setup will complete in X minutes" on the left. More file copy problems.. I retry but it still fails, so I pull a trick. I take out my cousin's Home CD, pop in my Pro CD, copy the file to the hard drive, put his Home CD back in, and point the missing file prompt to the C: drive instead for the file. This works.

After all is done, we boot into XP and it's acting totally crappy about everything. Game demos won't install (I/O errors), all kinds of crap. What I'm leading to is, where exactly is the problem??? Is it his CD? The DVD-ROM? The hard drive? If I try to install my XP Pro on his machine, same thing happens. But my CD installs fine on my computer, so this makes me think either his DVD-ROM or hard drive is hosed.

Is there any kind of testing I can do to pinpoint the exact problem? It's frustrating... it's 4am and we should be asleep, but this problem is keeping us awake. I'd appreciate any bit of info anyone can offer.. thanks!

-S
 
I done exactly the same, setup was taking far too long so I copied all the files to hd and pointed it to there. Games install fine, xp works fine as far as I have used it. And there is nothing wrong with any of my cd-rom/dvd/cdrw drives, they all work fine in both xp and win2k. I just think it's a glitch in the setup (probably scanning for hardware lol).
 
OK here's the latest..

With WinXP and 2K installations, there are two stages: the blue screen setup where you boot off the CD. If I'm not mistaken, in this stage, files are copied from the CD (\I386 directory) to the hard drive. Then the machine reboots and the second stage begins (the nice pretty screen that tells you X minutes left, and talks about Windows). In that second stage, files on the hard drive are processed, unpacked, etc.

The weird thing is, during the first stage (file copy process), an error came up saying that it couldn't copy the file wdmaud.drv. But there are no .drv files on the XP CD at all (I'm sure it's packed into a .cab file somewhere). Was it extracting from the .cab files, or trying to get a file that doesn't exist?

Anyway, we're going to put my DVD-ROM in his machine to see what happens. If it installs OK, then it's time for him to get a new DVD-ROM 🙂
 
I had this problem on my brothers comp, so I did a quick search and found out what was wrong somewhere. Can't remember where though. Apparently some drives have trouble reading the I386 folder on the WinXP cd and thus can't copy files from it. To install XP on my bros comp I just took out his generic IBM drive and dumped my Hitachi CD/DVD drive in, installed and swapped them back. Only problem we've had so far is that in XP his drive can't install Red Alert 2. Westwood suggest copying all the files from the cds onto the hdd, but it doesn't work, and Westwoods registry fixes don't exist. So if anyone knows how to fix this I'd like to know.
 
Can you try installing your copy of pro, just to see if it works, could be a bad xp cd.
Has any other operating system been installed on this system before?
 
I say the first thing to do is swap CD drives with him, and see if you can install.

If both his XP disk AND your XP disk show the same symptoms, it's not a bad CD. My first suspicion would be the CD player.
 


<< Can you try installing your copy of pro, just to see if it works, could be a bad xp cd.
Has any other operating system been installed on this system before? >>



Snoop, he said:

<< If I try to install my XP Pro on his machine, same thing happens. But my CD installs fine on my computer, so this makes me think either his DVD-ROM or hard drive is hosed. >>



🙂
 
Just about every HD maker has free utilities you can download to test the HD. Like the others say, a simple optical drive swap is a good test too.
 
OK.. we're about to shut down and swap DVD-ROMs. We both have the Toshiba..I think it's SD-M1402 or something like that. I haven't had any problems with mine really.. I don't like Toshiba much, but everyone on Anandtech said get it, get it, and get the 12x not the 16x. Next time around, I'll get the Pioneer 106S DVD-ROM.
 


<< OK.. we're about to shut down and swap DVD-ROMs. We both have the Toshiba..I think it's SD-M1402 or something like that. I haven't had any problems with mine really.. I don't like Toshiba much, but everyone on Anandtech said get it, get it, and get the 12x not the 16x. Next time around, I'll get the Pioneer 106S DVD-ROM. >>



Another idea is to swap IDE cables when you swap drives.
 
OK, swapping DVD-ROMs didn't help, so it could be a bad hard drive. Thing is, the installation fails while installing to EITHER of his two hard drives--what are the chances of both being bad? Could this be corrupt RAM? I've seen wacky things like this happen before. I had corrupt RAM once and when I booted Windows, it complained about weird missing files and such. Plus, when he tried to install Win2000, he got a blue screen during installation that said IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, which Microsoft says is a pointer problem of some sort.

We're running out of options.. we're close to just getting a new hard drive and seeing if that works. If not, maybe the problem is with the motherboard or RAM.

:frown: Damn it all. 🙁
 


<< OK, swapping DVD-ROMs didn't help, so it could be a bad hard drive. Thing is, the installation fails while installing to EITHER of his two hard drives--what are the chances of both being bad? Could this be corrupt RAM? I've seen wacky things like this happen before. I had corrupt RAM once and when I booted Windows, it complained about weird missing files and such. Plus, when he tried to install Win2000, he got a blue screen during installation that said IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, which Microsoft says is a pointer problem of some sort.

We're running out of options.. we're close to just getting a new hard drive and seeing if that works. If not, maybe the problem is with the motherboard or RAM.

:frown: Damn it all. 🙁 >>



Pull out everything except one stick of RAM, the CD drive, the video card and the HDD. It may be that some piece of hardware he has is not liked by XP.

After you get XP installed, add back the hardware one piece at a time, and boot.

BTW, did you try swapping the IDE cables like I suggested? A bad IDE cable can cause this too.
 
On my brothers during the first install he had 2 hdds in, and since then we've added another 40gb drive. It's not the hdd. However switching to a completely different make and model of cd drive does work.
I would say "trust me mate, it's just the cd/dvd drive" but with the way computers are sometimes it could be anything. Just try borrowing someone elses drive before you go out and buy a new hdd or ram.

Can I point out that from what i know it's nothing to do with a faulty cd or a faulty cd drive. It's to do with a certain make and model and the XP cd. You said both you and your friend have the same drives, so try a completely different drive.

This makes no sense does it?


EDIT: PLEASE try what I say. I don't want to make it sound like I know more than anyone else because I probably don't. But I have had this problem and solved it, everyone else is just theorizing.
 


<< Pull out everything except one stick of RAM, the CD drive, the video card and the HDD. It may be that some piece of hardware he has is not liked by XP.

After you get XP installed, add back the hardware one piece at a time, and boot.

BTW, did you try swapping the IDE cables like I suggested? A bad IDE cable can cause this too. >>



He only has one stick of RAM. But let's say XP doesn't like his Soundblaster Live card.. why would that cause file copy errors?

We didn't swap IDE cables yet. He told me that his cables are pretty badly twisted up inside his case.. maybe this is the problem. Should we swap IDE cables for both the DVD-ROM and the hard drive?
 
Sure, why not swap both cables? But I'd say the DVD cable is first priority; I've been through installing Win95 on an old box with an (almost) dead CD-ROM drive. It took a while because the drive wouldn't maintain its spin; kept spinning down.

Also, IDE cables should be inexpensive.
 


<<

<< Pull out everything except one stick of RAM, the CD drive, the video card and the HDD. It may be that some piece of hardware he has is not liked by XP.

After you get XP installed, add back the hardware one piece at a time, and boot.

BTW, did you try swapping the IDE cables like I suggested? A bad IDE cable can cause this too. >>



He only has one stick of RAM. But let's say XP doesn't like his Soundblaster Live card.. why would that cause file copy errors?

We didn't swap IDE cables yet. He told me that his cables are pretty badly twisted up inside his case.. maybe this is the problem. Should we swap IDE cables for both the DVD-ROM and the hard drive? >>



I say no. Swap things one at a time so you can identify which part is bad. If you do a bunch of things at once, you'll have to go back and one by one add them again until you get the error. And since you'll load XP only once (probably) you wont want to do that over and over again.
 
I had problems when i played around with my BIOS settings when installing Windows XP Pro. I am not sure why but I did run across some erros when I had my memory settings set too high. I would reset the BIOS settings to default or fail-safe. (if someone else suggested this, sorry didnt see it)

Yonux
 
I had very similar problems when I was upgrading to win2000. Setup was kinda shakey, and once I got everything installed I couldn't

install any software or drivers that weren't already bundled with win2000. For me the fix action was to flash my BIOS up to the most

current release. You may want to try this and see if it helps. I can't tell you why, but I can tell you that the BIOS seems to have a

dramatic effect on the way the system handles input/output operations. If you're running an outdated revision it could be the source

of a lot of your problems.


 
Some drives not being able to read the winxp cd is dma related from what I've heard. Should be some dma settings in the bios.
 
Problem found. It was corrupt RAM. I should've known, having had a similar problem before. I installed some RAM and booted into Windows to install it, and all kinds of files couldn't copy over, and when it booted into Windows, there were crashes left & right. Turns out it was the RAM.

The weird thing is, he had Crucial RAM installed, which is usually very reliable. I guess this was just a lemon...

Thanks, everyone, for your help.

-S
 
Well, a bad stick of RAM can happen any time, but Crucial will exchange it with no hassle.

Glad you found the culprit.
 
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