XP chokes but not Windows 7 during install...

[Hermskii]

I have been tasked with reworking an old Dell Inspiron1150 laptop. I was putting Windows XP Pro on it but each time, during the intitial setup at 34 minutes remaining during the Installing Drivers portion of the install, the laptop would blue screen. usually with a paging a non page area type error.

I tried a different install disk of XP. Same result. I tested the hard drive and it passed but put in a different hard drive and tried to install and got the same blue screen. I swapped the ram around and tried only half of it being 512mb instead of 1gb and it chokes on the same spot everytime.

I ran the full Dell diagnostics on it which test the mobo and the processor and everything and everything passed except the battery failed the test though it works just fine.

I can install Win 7 on it no problem. Any ideas?

 

[Binky]

My guess would be that this laptop was released after XP and the XP disk doesn't contain the required drivers. Figure out that driver is mising and load it manually during the setup process. The hard drive controller is the likely suspect. I think it's F6 during the install.

 

[jjmIII]

Dell Inspiron1150

My guess would be that this laptop was released after XP and the XP disk doesn't contain the required drivers.

It came with XP though.

Bad disk?

 

[Nothinman]

The pre-Vista installer is one of the shittiest programs ever "designed". Just about anything can cause it to not work in one way or another. I had an Inspiron (can't remember the model) that came with XP do the same thing when I went to load it up to sell to a friend. I had Linux on there so I hadn't noticed the issue and just attributed the problem to something Linux did to the disk that XP didn't like. I think we ended up doing something stupid like a Win2K install then XP upgrade to work around it.

 

[Hermskii]

Thank you folks! Yes, the laptop came with XP on it originally. No, I do not have the original disks that came with it and the restore type feature that Dell offers isn't available anymore on the hard drive. I did try different versions of the XP disk being one with SP3, one with SP2 and one with SP1a and they all failed in the exact same place even when using different hard drives so I know it wasn't the hard drive either. Yes, I too have thought to install an older OS and upgrade it to XP but I got the thumbs up to just go ahead and load Win 7 on it. Thanks again all for your replies!