XP won't install - suspect ram?

[WildW]

I'm trying to reinstall XP on a computer at work after the hard drive went bad, but it's being awkward.

Computer is a cheap MSI motherboard with onboard VGA, E2160 Pentiumish Core2ish thing, 80GB sata disk, not used for anything especially exciting, but trying to restore it to life.

Hadn't been used in a while, and Windows wouldn't start. It got halfway through the XP splash screen and then froze. Tried attaching the hard drive to another PC as a second drive to access the files, but its presence made the other computer freeze before it could get to windows. "So be it", I thought, a dead hard drive.

Tried another hard drive, a 160gig IDE we had spare but thought to be okay. Start XP installation from the CD, tries to format the disk but complains that it was unable to format it and that the disk is probably faulty.

Tried another hard drive, a brand new SATA drive. . . exactly the same problem, XP setup can't format it. I tried formatting it in another machine and then letting XP install onto it, but it immediately complains that it's unable to copy files onto the drive.

At this point I suspect the memory - I seem to recall duff memory causing problems with an XP installation before. I will try swapping it out on Monday. But if that doesn't fix it. . . what else? Bad motherboard?

 

[wanderer27]

First, I'd check the BIOS settings to make sure something screwy's not going on.

Laptop or Desktop?
Laptops can be a bit more of a pain to do because of all the additional Drivers for onboard stuff.

Do you have a similar machine you can format/install a clean drive on?
This you could then move to the one you're having problems with to see if that even works - could be MB, RAM (as you suspect), other issues.

Try your install procedure with just one stick of a RAM.
If you have a good stick you can pull from another machine, that would eliminate RAM issues.

 

[WildW]

Now you mention the bios, I did notice something odd when last I looked at it. In the PC Health stuff it was saying the CPU temperature was -2 degrees C. I don't have that much faith in the Intel stock cooler, so that's clearly wrong. Other temps looked about right and PSU rails all looked good. Thought this may be indicating bad memory again. I didn't have any suitable ram available on Friday but will take some in on Monday to try.

 

[oynaz]

Run memtest86 on the thing.