Win XP problems on brand new machine

[Thoth093]

brought my new computer home from the shop and booted it up. Things seemed to go fine until I tried to run some what I thought were rather basic applications.

I can't remember the exact error (had to go back to work,) but at various points it kept saying:

- File XXXX.XXX (usually DLL stuff) is not a valid Windows XP image. Please check it against your installation diskette.

Sounds like an install problem in Windows to me. I've got two drives, one SATA and one EIDE, and I'm thinking I'm going to try a fresh install on the EIDE drive to see if it fixes the problem. But I am wondering what the heck is going on here.

Any suggestions? I can post my system specs if need be.

Brian
Also posted in Troubleshooting Forum

 

[Chainzsaw]

Have you recently moved your drive?

Sounds almost as if Windows is trying to install drivers for something in your system.

Have you tried putting in your XP cd and letting it do whatever it wants?

I'm sure other people have better ideas, but maybe if none of them work, maybe a fresh install will be the magic trick.

Maybe try googling your question, and what it says.

 

[Thoth093]

I haven't had much chance to work with it at all. I was going to try to do a repair install first and see if I couldn't get that to work. I only had about 30 minutes to work with it before I had to run back to work. I don't think it's a hardware issue.

If need be I can pop the case and unhook the EIDE hard drive to see if may still somehow be the problem. The SATA drive is the system drive. The old drive WAS in another computer, but I formatted it completely before I got them to pop it into this one.

I dunno. Sort of disappointing, but probably fixable.

Brian

 

[Thoth093]

Apparently, this means that I'm actually missing the DLLs, not that they're there and corrupted as I first thought.

There is a program apparently in Windows called the System File Checker that goes through your system and makes sure all the DLLs are valid and accounted for. Apparently, you go to START>RUN, then type in:

sfc /scannow

After that, the next suggested step is the repair install.

Hope this works.

Brian