[Intermediary]

I'm making an inquiry for a friend..

She has a computer with 2 hard drives.
The problem began with a 'screen error' saying to check the monitor connection. She bought a new monitor and had the same error message.

She then began having hard drive read/write errors. Thinking she may have gotten a virus, she wiped both her hard drives and reformatted.

When she tries to reinstall XP it gets about half way through and gives her the read/write error again and will not complete installation. This is true for both of the hard drives.

So far she's tried cleaning the connections on her 4 memory sticks (while grounded) and still cannot reinstall Windows due to the read/write error.

What is your suggestion for her next step since she has no working operating system from which to run tests?

[Mumbodog]

Make and model of PC?

[Intermediary]

It's a custom build. I don't know the particulars for motherboard manufacturer etc. but I can try and find out if that's essential.

[Mumbodog]

It might help to know, This stuff can get technical, and you being the "in the middle" person, can make it even harder, but here goes.

Since there are two hard drives in the system, this makes me think it is some sort of raid configuration, but it may not be, would be good to know also.

I need to know what brand of hard drives these are also (Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi ect...)

I sounds like one or both of the hard drives are having problems, there is some diagnostic software you can run outside of windows to test the hard drives. As soon as you can get me the info I need, I can help you find and run this software.

In the mean time the memory modules can be tested to rule them out.



http://www.memtest.org/

Download the prebuilt ISO, burn it to CD as an Image, boot from that CD and run the memory test for a couple of hours or overnight to stress test the memory on the problem PC.

If you can figure out how to do this, then we have a chance of solving the problem.



.

[Intermediary]

Thanks for the link and info. I'll find out more tomorrow. She's in the UK and I'm in the US so not only am I in the middle, I'm in a completely different time zone.