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Windows XP Setup freezes

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Kirsle

Programmer
Jan 21, 2006
1,179
US
Okay, here's the deal with this computer:

A few years ago my grandparents bought three Compaq Presario desktop computers, one for my older brother, one for my cousin, and one for them to have at the house for general use. My brother got a new motherboard and tower, so he gave me his old tower and an old hard drive which we installed Windows XP Home on.

Sometime later my computer wouldn't start up for some unknown reason. I'd turn it on, the hard drives and CD drives would come on but the green power light wouldn't, and no signal went to the monitor. After giving up on trying to resolve that problem, I basically migrated over to that third computer my grandparents had. I kept that computer's primary hard drive (which had the OS already on it, configured to its own motherboard), but took the hardware from my "dead" computer, including the hard drive, memory, and video card.

So now the setup is: my brother has that new computer, my cousin is away in college in Canada and took his computer with him, and I was now using my grandma's last computer. And there was that empty shell of a dead computer left.

My grandparents eventually bought a new computer in the last week, so they have a computer now since all their other computers were gone. But they wanted to fix up the old empty dead computer so they'd have two computers at their house.

So they bought an 80 GB hard drive for it, a new IDE cable to connect the HD to the motherboard, and a new CD-RW drive. This computer still had some minor problems starting up, with the green light not coming on, but after messing with it we finally got it to start up.

So this 80 GB hard drive was completely empty and we were trying to install Windows on it. I put in a Windows XP Home boot disc and it booted up just fine...

During the initialization where it loaded drivers and stuff, the keyboard plugged into it seemed to work just fine. We could turn on and off all the locks on it (num lock, etc.). But after Setup went to its "Starting Windows..." step, the lock lights on the keyboard went off. When it got to the main menu where we'd normally go and pick a hard drive to format and install Windows on...

The keyboard would respond just fine for about 5 seconds. So we'd maybe be fast enough to get it to select a parititon to format. But after this period of about 5 seconds or so, the keyboard would stop responding and we couldn't go through with the setup process.

Anybody know why this is? I know that the keyboard is fine because it's the new one that came with the new computer, and I booted up Kubuntu Linux from a LiveCD on this old computer and it ran just fine and the keyboard worked just fine. But for some reason this Windows setup program keeps freezing up. Does it have to do with a hardware problem maybe, or the fact that the hard drive has nothing on it?

I know that the Windows XP disc works just fine because I reinstalled Windows on my home computer (the one that I took and used the hardware from that old computer) on a few different occasions, so I know that nothing's wrong with the setup program.

The question, in case you were lost in all the information here, is: why is the Windows XP boot disc's setup program freezing up? I'm talking about the DOSsey looking blue screen where you format partitions and install the initial setup files, not the user-friendly "Let's set up your computer" part.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Kirsle.net | Kirsle's Programs and Projects
 
Try starting the machine with a win98se bootdisk (floppy).
See if you can fdisk the drive and partition it etc and then try again.
I had a similar problem with a drive that used to have fedora 5 on it and I had to delete partitions and format etc before the XP setup would come up. Something to do with the MBR and grub I think.
 
I'd agree with elmurado - either using a bootdisk, or a live linux ditro, or by plugging the HD into another working system, just reformat the drive and go from scratch (make sure you scan it for physical faults etc as well). It seems clear everything but the HD is fine.
 
Windows XP is not very forgiving to hardware. Usually this is one of 2 problems. The power supply or the memory. Normally when Windows XP freezes it is the hardware. Sometimes some hardware is incompatible with windows. I have seen motherboards that were incompatible with windows xp. If you have multiple memory modules remove all but one and see if that helps.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
Use the COMPAQ keyboard.


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