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XP repair installation woes

B

Blues X

Member
My system has been getting continually more screwed up over the last week, so I'm trying an XP repair reinstallation.

My system does recognize the cd-rom, and the drive works fine. I insert the XP disc, hit "install", then "reinstall", download new setup files, then it executes the first system restart for the setup procedure.

On the restart, it asks if I want to boot from the cd since that's the initial boot device. So it obviously knows there's a CD-rom installed.

The Xp setup screen appears for about 1/3 of a second, then I get a blue screen saying:
"Setup cannot find a cd-rom drive."
Setup cannot continue, hit F3.

It's just a regular IDE dvd/cdrw drive. My system has two SATA drives, and I tried installing those drivers from a diskett during the setup but received the same error message once that was finished.

I have run several system diagnostics, and all the hardware passes with flying colors.

I have tried disconnecting my second cd-rom drive - same error.
Disconnected main cd-rom drive and used second cd-rom drive (Liteon cd-rw) - same error.
I made sure the system bios was set to boot from the cd-rom first. And made sure the jumper on the cd-rom was set to "master". And everything looks fine in the hardware manager.

The original problem I'm trying to solve with the repair install is that something (apparently) is corrupt within the Windows OS. Photoshop loses button labels if the XP theme is running (have to run the 'classic' theme); PS crashes to desktop with no error logged in the system 85% of the time when trying a "save as"; and today PS would not let me browse anything other than My Documents (freezes if you click Desktop, My Computer, or anything else; error shows a common XP interface module is causing the problem).

Eight uninstalls/reinstalls of Photoshop did not repair the problem, so I'm trying the OS.

Plus I'm getting other random weird errors/crashes in Firefox and a few other programs.

The ever-brilliant Dell support (it's a Precision 370 workstation) suggested trying the XP cd in another computer. Since the problem only appears when trying an install, I'm not sure how they expect me to violate the EULA and install "Dell only" software on a non-Dell machine.

If anyone has any tips or clues, it would be greatly appreciated. At this point, I'm ready to kill this machine.
 
I tried the "boot from cd" option, and it went into the regular XP setup without any problems. I stopped it so I wouldn't overwrite anything.

I have no idea why it accepts and finds the CD-rom drive in all cases except for a repair install.
 
I just tried renaming the drive designations, so my cd-rom would be drive D (instead of the 2nd hd being drive D). No luck.

I'm ready to say "screw it", and just reformat this damn system.
 
This doesn't address your problem directly, but what do you mean by "my system is getting more screwed up"? A repair install will generally NOT fix most of the likeliest causes of an unstable OS. Keep in mind that a reapir install still inherits the old registry.

If you have a spyware or virus problem, a repair install DEFINATELY will not fix it.

You're better off using System Restore to roll the computer back to the condition it was in BEFORE your problems began. Or worst case doing a clean install (but then you have to figure out what's up with your CD).

 
Thanks for the reply Penguin.

By "getting more screwed up", I mean an increasing number of program errors and crashes to desktop. Most involve Photoshop CS, but other programs such as Firefox have also been having an increasing number of errors. Some crashes are programs faulting DLLs, some just crash "cleanly" with no error event logged.

AdAware hasn't found anything suspect, and neither has Norton's Antivirus. And Windoctor didn't find any errors in the registry.

Since multiple attempts to uninstall/reinstall Photoshop did not help, I began suspecting problems in the OS. I wanted to try a repair reinstall to see if replacing some of the system files would help with the problems.

Dell is going to send me another XP CD, so I'm going to try that before I give up and perform a clean install.

Regarding the system restore, when I got this computer there was some reason (I cannot remember what it was) that I had to turn off the system restore. Like an idiot, I never turned it back on. So I have no good restore point 🙁

 
Well, I finally got a repair reinstall completed. I had to copy an image of the XP disc onto my second hard drive, and then run the installer off that.

But it still didn't help my original problem in Photoshop 🙁

So now I'm back to square one. Yay!
 
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