Hi all. I have a friend who asked me to put XP on a Compaq Presario V6000. Turion 64 dual core CPU, 1gb ram, 90gb hdd. He picked up a copy of XP pro. The system worked decent, but unfortunately came with vista pre-installed. I wiped the drive and attempted to upgrade to XP. However, halfway through the install, the system randomly shuts down.

The install will not even progress past the phase of copying files to the drive. At random points, it just shuts off. Sometimes during the file copying phase, sometimes after the first reboot where it configures files. It simply shuts off. I suspected a bad hard drive, so I swapped the drive into a known good machine and successfully installed an OS on it. I ran a few sector scans on the drive, and in the machine it initially came in, it shuts down. The same drive, placed in a dell d620 shows no errors.

I then suspected ram, so I swapped the ram with some ram from a known, good machine and it still shuts down halfway through the file copying process.

Finally, I suspected bad board, or bad WIFI card, so I yanked the mini-pci Wifi card and attempted to test using a bootable linux disc (knoppix). The system boots and runs fine for several hours. I can surf the web with it and load applications ok.

So.. what gives!? Hard drive checks out fine, Ram checks out fine and the system even boots using a cd-based OS. Is there any way I can get an OS on this thing!?

Perhaps it's an optical drive issue. Either the drive is faulty or a connection maybe?

do you use an original copy of a windows xp cd or a backup cd? tried a different install cd?

This is a retail copy of XP. Also, the unit resets even when not accessing the drive.

racerx509, as i told earlier, this model is most fault laptop on today. your symptoms may: northbridge(nvidia n6150go or n6100go) faulty,southbridge faulty(nf430 chip), or videochip faulty. first, try to clean the heatsink, then upgrade your BIOS(this is important).

Turion 64 dual core CPU needs 64 bit XP pro. may be the problem is.

X86-64 architecture has full compatibility with IA32 architecture.

It is possible that you need a certain operating disc that supports you're mother board because some motherboard require certain drivers that xp does not contain which means you will need the motherboard disc or you may have to switch back to vista also it could be that the computer is overheating and shutting down/restarting to protect itself from damage.
Please let me know if this helps.
John