Extraordinaryly slow XP install????

[bigbrat41]

What would cause an extremely slow XP install?

Dell Dim. 3000, 2.8 ghz P4, 60 gig Hdd, Dell's disk

This thing is taking a zillion times longer than it should.
(my son's comp. , I just did mine AGAIN the other night so I have a pretty good frame of reference)

 

[wolfram]

A very slow HDD (5400 RPM, 512Kb or 2MB cache) or slow CD/DVD drive?

Or maybe a somewhat damaged installation CD.

 

[Nodsu]

A bad hard drive? Overheating CPU? Bad motherboard? Bad IDE cable? Forked up BIOS settings?

 

[bigbrat41]

Thank you

I appreciate the time and effort from you both.

My son (19) continues to think that he knows more than his Father (as they all do) . He recently tried to upgrade some hdwe and the comp. crashed. He gave me only a few minutes before he took it to a repair service. They said it was a bad HDD. Admittedly I found this hard to believe and said so. He went back to the original hdwe config and started over and lo and behold the XP install disk did boot to install. It just (per the thread) takes 1000583 times longer than it should. Last night when he got home I reiterated your answers to which he replied that he had run chdsk and received an AOK. I believe that WHEN XP finishes the install he will get a rude awakening.

Thank you again.

 

[Nodsu]

chkdsk only tests the filesystem. You have to tell it specifically to test for bad sectors and even that doesn't necessarily reveal any drive issues.

Use specialised tools for testing things. Most hard drive makers supply diagnostics utilities for their drives.