Hey guys and gals,

Was wondering if anyone may be able to help guide me in the right direction here.

I am trying to upgrade a system for a friend, I have loaded win xp many times on many systems but this one is troublesome. He has a 400 mhz proc. 512 megs of ram, ect ect, above what the specs say to, and when I load XP up, the first set of files get copied to the drive and then the second part, (after it reboots) it gets to a point that says starting win xp and wont finish loading the files nessasary.

I LL'ed the drive thinking it was maybe a bad sector or anything but to no avail.......
Anyone had this trouble before?

i believe there was a similar thread in the last few days, but i think that one had an error message... does your install just freeze up? if there is an error that might be helpful.

If you have a spare graphics card, put it in and try installing again. I had same problem and it would not initialize the card, although it shows up at start of installation.

no, no error message, no additional video card to initialize either. it just hangs. I did look through some older posts before asking because the best info is usually looked into before asking again hahaha

not to sure if this will make a difference either, I can successfully load win 2000 on it and did. The XP hangs every time though.??

Do you have any extra Ram you could swap in, in place of the 512mb? Alot of times bad ram will cause xp to freeze(has happened to me multiple times).

believe it or not, I have even tried that. Computer repair is my field, I tried anything I could think of before asking here, as well as reading up on it. I wish I knew what was going on, software is not my forte'. I can fix some troubles but hardware is where I get to have fun and play.

Maybe you could try something I've heard before. You copy the entire Windows XP cd onto the HDD. Then run setup straight off there.... Something someone did awhile back while having problems installing Windows XP....

How about BIOS settings? Is it set to Plug & Play OS?
What about BIOS cachable and settings like that? You probably already went through those..just some helpful ideas....

hhmm, I havent thought about the copy thing, here is a stupid question then, does the win xp have th cab files to copy over like win98 does? I should have checked that already but havent. If not, what files? Should I just do a copy *.*?? to the C drive?