please help me cant reinstall windows xp mce

[higuy]

Well anyway my boss's computer a few days ago had a blue screen that said stop : c000021a and i did some research and most of the ppl just reinstalled the windows or used bart pe so i tried the bart pe and i couldnt figure out what i needed to do So i ended up getting the Windows xp media center edition the one that came with his hewlett packard and everytime i boot the computer with it in the drive it tells me msvfw32.dll was not found then it says if i want to delete values in my registry then reboot. i reboot it and it just says the same things. Ive tried starting it in safemode and no luck even using diff windows xp cds just to reinstall and start from scratch. He doesnt care about getting anything back that was on his HD he just wants his computer to work again.

 

[higuy]

and thank you to anybody who has time to help me with this one. i swear i did alot of research and came up with nuthing. This place is awesome tho it has alot of useful info more so than all others ive been to.

 

[Rik]

Make sure the bios is set to be able to boot from cd.

 

[higuy]

It is set. and when i try to run the setup that same error comes up saying i msvfw32.dll was not found .

 

[Rik]

We need a bit more info from you. Have you reformatted the hard drive? How far does it get through the windows install process before you get the error message?

 

[AlbertLionheart]

Higuy - do you think you have the right CD here? Are you sure you have booted from the CD as you should not be seeing any messages about missing files if you have booted from a bona fide XP install CD

 

[hynesy]

Also, because operating systems are so complicated and have so many files, if the CD you are using is burnt, then its very possible that its a bad burn. Happens with linux so I assume it happens with XP too.
cheers
Hynesy
PS Welcome to Techspot :wave:

 

[higuy]

i am very sure. I tried another windows xp disk in there also an older one that came with my computer do you think that could have messed it up some how? I dont see why both the windows xp install cd's boot perfectly fine on my computer. well when i go back to work ill try a few new things that might work. i would say i dont wanna make it worste than it is but i dont think i can lol.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

I suppose it is possible that as it won't read several boot disks, the CD/DVD drive on this machine is bad?

 

[hynesy]

The cd would be bad if only one CD fail, since many disks failed it must not be the CD. But I do have a suggestion for you, when I went to reinstall Fedora and Vista on my machine after the annual reformat I ran into troubles with both, Windows would say I would be missing something.dll. The fix to this was to hi-jack a spare cd/dvd player and install it. The installation went ahead without a hitch. funny thing tho, my DVD burner works fine after windows is installed. So long story short, try a different cd/dvd player.
cheers
Hynesy

fixed typos

 

[higuy]

cannot be the cd drive other windows cd boots up it just ends up freezing when installing something.. when i get to work i will right down what it says. But i kinda wanted to put the windows xp mce cuz thats what they already had in the first place. But i guess i cant get picky i just want to get it running so my boss's wife doesnt go crazy thinking she killed the computer lol.

 

[hynesy]

Thats a symptom of a crappy cd drive, it either fails during copying or screws up the copying of files and windows installation doesn't notice until installation when it checks the files.
cheers
hynesy