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Windows XP refuses to install

F

firestorm225

Senior member
Ok, I'm about to go crazy here, so someone please help me out.

I've been having various problems with Windows before. It all started when I tried to boot the computer, but it wouldn't get past the Windows log in screen. I went to the Windows XP format, and it said the drive was empty. So I formatted, reinstalled Windows, while installing SP1, the coomputer restarted during the middle of the isntallation. After this, Windows XP would not start once again, it said a file was missing. So I did the repair reinstall, and everything was fine again. I installed SP1, and after I reset the first time, it said that pci.sys critical file was damaged or missing. I did a repair reinstall, but after it tried to repair it, it froze and got stuck. I restarted, and it said critical files were missing in the Windows/System folder.

So I decided to format again. I just finished formatting and reinstalling, and now, almost everytime I restart, it gets to the loading screen (with the moving bar at the bottom), then, a cursor appears, but no user selection screen. In a few seconds, the computer restarts, and the same thing keeps happening. About once in every 30 times it does get to Windows user selection screen, but when I restart it the same problem happens.

I've checked every single cable in my case, set the BIOS to fail-safe, I've tried reinstalling Windows many times, and I still get the problem. I can't figure out if it's a hardware problem or not because Windows installs and initially boots with absolutely no problems. If it's a software problem, I don't know what it is. Here is my system

1ghz T-Bird
384mb ram
GeForce4 TI4200
SB Live Value
NIC card
80gb Seagate hard drive
CDRW drive
300 watt power supply

Any suggestions? I don't feel like formatting and installing for the fourth time in two days
 
You might want to put an old video card in and install. I`ve had a couple of systems that refused to install XP with a nivida video card (several IWILL KK266 ).


Edit: A couple refused to install, and I had one do a full install then no futher(wouldn`t boot up)
 
Unfortunatly, I don't have a video card, but I might go and buy one at Compusa tommorow to use it for testing.

But I have another hypothesis now.

I'm leaning towards it being a power supply problem now. I have a generic power supply that came with my case. It's 300 watts, and it's powering a lot of stuff in my system. Now, safe mode appears to work every single time, yet normal only works rarely. Could it be that it just doesn't have enough juice when it tries to start on normal mode?

I've also noticed that a few days ago, many games and 3D Mark would crash after a few minutes. Could it be that as the graphics card got going and it sucked up all the remaining power the power supply could offer, and now the power supply has burnt out or severly weakened? Does that sound feasable?

And one more thing, the GF4 is new, I got it about 2 weeks ago. I also overclocked my system last week. Could it just be that the power supply just couldn't power all the stuff in my system?
 
Well, I'm gonna head down to CompUSA tommorow and pick up a 400w power supply, and if it works, I'll return it and order a high quality one online.
 
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