XP install problem

[jtusa]

Friend is reinstalling XP. He puts the XP cd in, boots from the CD, comes up with Windows Setup blue screen, shows "Windows Setup" at the top left but then hangs there. He has two drives, tried both, tried two seperate actual XP discs, tried copies of the XP discs and same thing.

WTF could be the problem???

ETA: From continued research the only thing I can come up with is that he needs to load SATA drivers for Windows to install on the drive. You press F6 at the blue screen to do this. Pressing F6 does absolutely nothing. Is there another way to load the SATA drivers before you get into the XP install?

 

[firewall]

Is the keyboard one of those Office keyboards with extra keys for performing tasks in MS Office? You might need to disable office mode before pressing F6 which might be in use for some other function.

 

[Tony Williams]

Sorry jtusa, I am not too sure what you are talking about. Please tell us more detail!

Anyway once you see the blue screen it's perfectly NORMAL for it to take ages, takes 10/15 on my old computer.

Try just leaving it for awhile, I think it's the bottom right hand corner it tell you what you are doing if it locks at a certain ponit come back in 20 mins, see if it's still doing the same thing.

Also, you didn't state the specs of the laptop.

 

[CDC Mail Guy]

Last time I had problems installing OS, it turned out to be that the RAM stick was bad. This probably isn't the problem in this case, because it doesn't sound like what was happening to me, but it's worth a shot.

 

[mezrah]

Originally posted by: asadasif
Is the keyboard one of those Office keyboards with extra keys for performing tasks in MS Office? You might need to disable office mode before pressing F6 which might be in use for some other function.

Agreed.. Press the F Lock button to enable/disable the function keys. Try this and see if it still doesn't work

 

[jtusa]

He figured it out it looks like. He doesn't have a floppy drive on this particular PC, so he plugged one so he could make a floppy driver disk of his SATA drivers. Apparently that did the trick. I have no idea why it didn't like the CD that had the drivers(expecially since it worked when he originally installed XP. Explain that one to me??). Thanks for the input though.

About the F lock button, I had thought of that already since I almost put my tower through a wall one time for the very same reason.