WinXP crashed, now hard drive problems

[Slick5150]

I put a new system together earlier this year, installed WindowsXP, and have been running fine since then. Yesterday, I was in the middle of a game of Warcraft III when Windows crashed and rebooted, it came back up fine for awhile, but then once again rebooted itself without warning. After that it would no long boot back up, but would give me a blue screen, or on a rare occasion, I could get to the desktop, but then it would quickly either give me the blue screen or reboot itself.

So, after failing to fix this, I just decided I would format the hard drive and reinstall. However, now when I am trying to reinstall windows, it's been crashing early on in the installation process with protection faults and vaious other error messages. I've tried reformatting the C: partition, erasing and recrating the partition, etc, but I can't figure out what's going on here. Is there something wrong the hard drive physically? The data on the D: partition seems uneffected, but I simply cannot get Windows to install anymore. Any ideas? Here's my system specs:

ECS K7S5a motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1700
384mb DDR RAM
60gb Western Digital 7200rpm drive (partitioned into a 10gb, and 50gb partitions)
Lite-On 24X CD-RW
ATI Radeon LE
Sounblaster Audigy

Any help would be most appreciated.

 

[Demonicon]

You need to post the errors you are getting.

 

[Slick5150]

Ok, well I just reran Win2000 setup, and it gave me this error message when it started copying setup files:

---
*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0xF0005AE8,0x00000000,0x8041E0C4,0x00000002)
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

*** Address 8041E0C4 base at 80400000, DateStamp 384d5a76 - ntoskrnl.exe
---

It has given other messages though, one was something like
IRQL_IS_LESS_THAN_(Something I forget now). It has also given different filenames than ntoskrnl.exe

Any ideas?

 

[Kaiser__Sose]

are you overclocking?? if you are go back down to default speeds and try again.

 

[Slick5150]

No, I'm not overclocking.

 

[bruincal]

I think it sounds like a hard drive failure to me...
You should go to www.westerndigital.com, and download their diagnotics software. I forgot the name, but its under the Downloads/Support section.. It will create a boot disk on which you can boot to and check every aspect of your hard drive for problems or defects.

 

[Demonicon]

Reseat your memory module(s), check this link for more info.

 

[Slick5150]

Demonicon,

Good call on the RAM. I had it configured with a 128mb stick in DDR1, and a 256mb stick in DDR2. I switched them, and my computer would no longer do anything when I turned it on. So, I took out the 128mb stick, same thing. I took out the 256mb stick and put in the 128mb stick, and it booted up fine, and everything seems to be working now. So, the problem seems to be traced to the Crucial 256mb DIMM. Go figure. Seems kind of early for RAM to go bad (expecially since I thought Crucial was known to be really good?), but their customer service was very quick to help me get an RMA to replace it, so that's at least a positive for them.

But, anyways, thanks for the help, this seems to have taken care of it (though I'll have to live on 128mb of RAM until I get the new peice).

Thanks again