I am stumped Windows wont reformat

Ok I have a client that has a 1 year old compaq laptop. The thing always uses AVG antivirus. She called me and said it would not load windows. I checked it and indeed it would reboot 2 or 3 times on its own during startup. So I did what most lazy techs would do with a system that did not have any importaint information stored on it. I formated the drive and was going to do a fresh install. During the instal windows it kepts saying windows could not load this file and that. I cleaned the disk same thing! Got a new disk Same thing, Tried Vista Same thing! So I put a new Hard Drive in and guess what Same thing. I chalked it up to a hardware failure but guess what another client just called and she has the Same thing! Anyone have this problem? and if so did you find a solution?

Brad

Every other file

It starts out with Dll files and then if I skip it it will add 2 or 3 and then stop again weird huh?

Hi,
I have seen this problem before and the ram was bad. I would test the the ram, if you are sure the CD-Rom and CD is good.

Hi,

I have a weird...really weird PROBLEM and I think it ties into the same thing you all are discussing.

When my compaq laptop loads up, It goes through the whole black screen and windows logo but after that, it shows my desktop background image and then it goes to the blue screen of death that reads:

*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0x8B0F82A4, 0x00000001,0x8063381C,0x00000000)

I ran a primary hard disk self test and the results are:

(S.M.A.R.T)
100% complete

(Quick) Pass
(Comprehensive) Pass
(S.M.A.R.T) Pass
Hit any Key to exit.

Well when I did that, I assumed that a quick fix would be to repartition the hard drives and start from scratch but the fun didn't stop there. When i went to reinstall windows, it told me that it could not find the hard drive. After that, I decided to hit r and repair it but it said the same thing, "....could not find hard drive"

is it my memory???

Tech Spec:

Compaq presario v5000 laptop with a scsi hard drive. 512 megs of RAM running a xp home os.

I work with computers and this beats all I've seen.

The only way to find out is to test it.

Is there a memory test in the bios? If not, get Memtest86 and boot into it. Let it run awhile. There is an article on it here somewhere.

This to me says either dodgy CD or dodgy CD player.
Any scratches on the CD?

How though...

I'm super ignorant on how to make a boot cd or a boot usb key and which memtest86 do i download?

...and I do not see a memory test in bios.