Upgrade from XP Home to Pro Issue.

[Malice]

I want to upgrade from Home to Pro and just failed doing so. It works fine up until it reboots. After rebooting it hangs on the "Starting Setup" screen about four bars away from completion. My dad(who is experienced in this kind of stuff) seems to think I need a driver for my SATA hard drive. I'm not quite sure on what to do. Here are my specs:

320 Gb Hard Drive(I forget the make, but I know it's SATA)
Socket AM2 Asus m2n4 SLI
AMD 64 x2 3800+ Dual Core
1Gb of RAM
nVidia BFG GeForce 7900 256mb GT OC video card
Windows Home SP2

P.S. I don't have a floppy drive.

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

Why upgrade, they never work, go buy the full version and do a clean install.

You will need to load drivers for a SATA drive, but it can only be done from a floppy drive, the only option is to buy an IDE HD and use that for the OS and use the SATA for storage.

Regards

 

[Malice]

I went ahead with the upgrade and have now encountered a major problem. While installing there were errors where the setup could not copy certain files. I tried to discontinue but the program just continued installing. One of the files that failed to copy was policman.dl_ .After it had finished installing my computer will get up to the "Windows XP" load screen and then reboot and repeat this ad infinitum. Another file that has been creating errors is sptd.sys. I suspect the RAID driver that was installed at the beginning of the upgrade may have something to do with this. I can still boot into safe mode. Can I recover my computer without having to format? Please help.

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

Sounds like bad memory, it causes the bad file copy as XP reads the file to memory then writes it to the HD during setup, I have encountered this and solved it after changing Disks and Cdrom drives.

i would suggest checking your memory with Memtest86 but you dont have a floppy drive to launch it on, your option is to get someone to make a version on CD, check the memory 1 stick at a time, if you dont find a faulty stick after 8 passes try installing with just 1 stick in and see if it fails, if it does try the other stick,

Post back and let us know how you go on.

Regards

 

[Malice]

Well things have gotten worse yet again, how, I'm not even sure. It's become an absolute nightmare. I decided to cut my loses and just start fresh(but keep my old data by using a hard drive my dad brought home from work). Seems I can't even do that and until just a few minutes ago I realized nothing was working because my graphics card had MELTED. Thankfully it's new so I can hopefully get it replaced, if not I'm ready to just throw my computer out the window.

 

[Tedster]

I doubt it is bad memory. Do a clean install with XP Pro.

 

[Malice]

I can't even do that right now. I need to format my hard drive but I can't do anything without a graphics card. I don't have on board video.