[diesel43078]

Ok, I've got another one. I have another laptop here I'm trying to get XP installed on. This one was raw and had no OS before the attempted XP install. I can get it to boot from the disk, and load the installation files, but it hangs on the "Windows setup" screen where it says "setup is starting windows". I've removed the harddrive and partitioned and formatted it as NTFS and I'm still hanging up on the windows setup screen. I know the install disk is good, and the hard drive seems to be good. Could there be another hardware issue here? Any ideas?

Thanks,

Anthony

[johnebadbak]

the hdd may have a small section that the original manufacturer used to install rescue disk info.A low level format would clean the hdd completely.
www.hddguru.com
check memory capacity need 512mbytes to install and run xp.
also do a complete check of the hdd surface with tools from the HDD manufacturer site. If there are bad sectors on it then the surface can't be written to till the bad bits are mapped out. by the hdd tool

[diesel43078]

RAM is sufficient, has 1GB. I did a low-level format of the drive tonight, so I'll try to reinstall tomorrow.

Thanks,

Anthony

[alias81]

I would also try installing with an external cd or dvd drive. I have installed various OS on tons of different machines an in some instances it is just easier installing off an external if for some reason it doesn't want to install of the internal drive. May not be a serious hardware issue but your drive is probably just showing signs of wear & tear from being over the time, it happens.