Please Help! XP Pro Installation Problems!

[deversol]

I have spent several days trying to get XP installed on my system, to no avail.

I have an Asus A7v133 mobo with a 1.3GHz Athlon, and am installing XP on a WD SE 80gb hard drive formatted in NTFS. I also have 768MB of Crucial PC133 CL2 SDRAM, a Leadtek GeForce4 Ti4400, and a Mitsumi CD-ROM.

I booted with the XP cd and setup started. After it copied the temporary files from the CD, I got a message saying "Setup is Starting Windows" and it just hangs there...I had moved the hard drive from master to slave, and from the primary to secondary IDE port and get the same result...I have removed all but one RAM chip, removed the sound card, ethernet card, everything but the video card, hard drive, and CD-ROM. I had also installed an old GeForce2 32MB card instead of the GeForce4. I have also flashed the BIOS to the latest version on the Asus site, ver. 1.009, and get the same result no matter what.

I then put the hard drive in my roommate's computer and was able to get XP completely installed on that hard drive with no problems. I then put that hard drive in my PC, as the master drive, and set up BIOS so that it will boot from there first....I then get an error during boot-up saying something like "Disk read error, press ctrl+alt+delete to reboot"...I can understand that, the HAL is all messed up, but it was installed on my roommate's PC with no problems, meaning that the hard drive is fine.

I had also installed Win2k Pro on that same hard drive in my PC with the same hardware configuration as above, and had no problems. Then, while in Windows 2k, I inserted the Windows XP cd and started installing it. After the files were copied from the CD, XP rebooted my system. During reboot, the black Windows XP screen came up saying it was loading, and it just froze. I tried to reboot several times and it did the same thing each time. Then, I booted from the Windows XP cd and started to install it again. Once the files were copied from the CD, a message at the bottom of the screen said something like "Setup is Starting Windows" and it just hangs there...

I had also used the official XP boot disks available from Microsoft. After all of the drivers are copied, I get the "Setup is Starting Windows" message.

I have also replaced my GeForce card with an old SiS PCI video card and get the same result. I have tried just one RAM chip (tried all three) in all three different slots...same thing...

Ive tried formatting the drive in FAT, FAT32, as well as NTFS....

Ive also tried to load BIOS defaults and get the same result...

Last but not least, I copied all of the files from the i386 directory to my hard drive, booted with a Win98 floppy into DOS, and ran Setup from there....same result as above...

I feel like I have tried everything possible to get XP installed. Can anyone think of anything else I can try? Ive been at this for days now with no luck...Thankfully I still have Win2k installed on another hard drive so I can still use my computer....

Any ideas? Thanks for any assistance!

 

[Jojo1971]

setup keeps on restarting after everything is installed??? lol i got the same headache before..

this happened to me before while installing winXP and what i did was use an old win98 start-up disk and run FDISK --->DELETED the existing partition-->then made a new partition--> then reboot --> then formatted the new partition (FAT32) --->then proceeded to installing XP again --it worked..

*if you cant find a 98 start-up disk, you may use the Utility Disk that comes with your HD..Mine was from Maxtor but i was able to use it to partition/format my Western Digital, Seagate and IBM HDD's..just make sure you DELETE the existing partition and MAKE A NEW ONE then FORMAT...(ive read in a forum there are STUBBORN hidden files that dont get wiped out by mere reformatting and i think theyre the ones that causes the endless installation..

 

[deversol]

Originally posted by: Jojo1971
setup keeps on restarting after everything is installed??? lol i got the same headache before..

this happened to me before while installing winXP and what i did was use an old win98 start-up disk and run FDISK --->DELETED the existing partition-->then made a new partition--> then reboot --> then formatted the new partition (FAT32) --->then proceeded to installing XP again --it worked..

*if you cant find a 98 start-up disk, you may use the Utility Disk that comes with your HD..Mine was from Maxtor but i was able to use it to partition/format my Western Digital, Seagate and IBM HDD's..just make sure you DELETE the existing partition and MAKE A NEW ONE then FORMAT...(ive read in a forum there are STUBBORN hidden files that dont get wiped out by mere reformatting and i think theyre the ones that causes the endless installation..

Thanks for the reply Jojo1971. Setup doesnt even really begin at all....it just copies the files from the CD to a temporary folder for the install, but doesnt start installing Windows. I have reformatted several times, but I havent tried to delete and recreate the partition. I'll give that a shot this evening (Im at work now).

Another thing I did notice is that when the computer freezes up at either the black Windows XP screen (prior to installation) or when it freezes at "Setup is starting Windows", the LEDs on my keyboard go out...so I suppose the keyboard is dying...could it have something to do with the PS/2 keyboard port? I have the Microsoft Internet keyboard...would it be possible to hook it up to either a serial port or a USB port? I tried another keyboard that plugs into the same port and get the same result...

Anyone have any other ideas?