trouble installing XP with 3 different install discs

[ThePiston]

friend of mine can't install on his new computer. He keeps getting "cannot copy file xyz.xyz". He's used 3 different (but all good) discs. He's gotten the same error on same file one one disc which makes me think RAM, but he switched out RAM with a stick of mine and still nothing. Any thoughts?

 

[Nocturnal]

Did he switch out ALL ram? How many ram sticks did he have? If he has two and he only switched out one with yours try only putting in your one stick.

 

[ThePiston]

he only had one and took it out and used mine, it's same

 

[ThePiston]

just found out he's using 300W PSU.... problem?

 

[drag]

Maybe. Doubt it.

One thing that had me in fits for a while when I was building a AMD 64 machine with a Via motherboard was that the motherboard had 3 slots in it, but you could only use 2 of them for 400mhz (200mhz in ddr mode, of course) ram. You could use al 3 for 333mhz ram, but only 2 of them would work.

Well I didn't realise that and I had ram in slots 2 and 3 and it was 400mhz, the WinXP install would run fine for a little while but would always screw up on the same place. It would act like it was working for a while, then lock up...

Switching the RAM around fixed this and it ran flawlessly. Don't know if this is your situation, but it sounds familar on the face of it.

 

[bsobel]

Swap out the IDE cables....

Bill

 

[mechBgon]

Full system specs, and the brand of that 300W unit and the RAM?

 

[gwag]

maybe your cd rom is fuxored and cant read files well? I have had this problem and using a brand new drive fixed it and made instalation mucho faster.

 

[Jolt2]

You could try this: make sure the hard drive and CD-ROM are on different IDE controllers. Set both to master with the hard drive on the primary controller and the CD-ROM on the secondary controller. It could also be a bad IDE cable or a bad CD-ROM. Setup the CD-ROM and hard drive as above and if that does not work try a different CD-ROM.