Problem installing winxp/win2k - Tech Support Forums

jl123 · March 10th, 2002, 08:59 PM

For some reason on one of my friends computer I cannot install windows xp or win2k on his machine. Specs are iffy. I know the board is a PCchips making it the worst board u can find but still this is quite annoying. It had winME on it before and i said I would put winxp or win2k on it. It was his backup machine he hardly used it but anyways I'm kinda in a jam. When installing xp it gives me the black error screen saying the memory has been dumped yada yada. If you can give me some general things to try it would be appriciated.

Athlon xp 1700
pcpchips mobo
256MB PC2100
40gig Seagate HD
onboard video

Thx

snaggle · March 10th, 2002, 09:05 PM

This may sound dum but try installing the Operating system from the hard drive, just copy the content on the cd to a location on the hard drive and try Installing it, you will never know It might work!

__/Snaggle\__

Redwolf · March 10th, 2002, 09:29 PM

format the HDD first. then install the OS

MrEd · March 11th, 2002, 01:29 AM

you don't need to copy the whole disk to the hd, just the i386 folder. then run winnt.exe from a dos prompt.

jl123 · March 11th, 2002, 02:06 AM

ERrr

It ended up being bad ram.

Replaced it and now it's working great

Thanks all for the help

~Joel

shigum · March 11th, 2002, 02:34 PM

Been there before, LOL. 2000/XP is much pickier about the RAM it uses. I've installed 9x on a machine with so-so RAM, that 2000/XP wouldn't run on. Little hint, if you're ever installing 2000/XP, and you get an error during the file copy stage that says "Setup is unable to copy file xxx", make sure it's not the cd. If it still doesn't work, 9 times out of 10 it's RAM. May not be bad memory, sometimes some mobo's just won't work with some brand of memory. Putting in different memory has always fixed the issue for me.

DLR37919 · April 15th, 2002, 12:12 AM

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Hossy · June 11th, 2002, 05:05 AM

Just in case anyone was wondering why Win2k and WinXP are more "picky" about the RAM...here is the explantation:

Because both opearting systems are based on NT, they work closer to the processor just like UNIX (but not as stable).

When you buy generic memory (PNY is also generic if you didn't know), the manufacturer generaally buys the board from one company, the chips from another company, etc. resulting in bad timing for the RAM. When you work at such a low level wiht the processor and use the advanced features of the processor (unlike Win9x/ME - btw, WinME is Win98 that looks like Win2k), the timing of the RAM becomes of greater importance. Bad timing is hard to pin point, however, because sometimes Windows will report the same STOP code and sometimes you'll get a different code everytime. I've had Windows install and boot up fine, but the computer would just stop processing every 10 seconds for 1 second. This was also do to bad memory timing. I found this out the hard way when I bought a 256MB stick of generic memory and had to return it because of bad timing. Now, I buy either Kingston or Crucial memory, but tend to lean toward Crucial for the price.

infos · July 28th, 2002, 06:12 PM

Thanks for all the good tips...current rig came with
XP installed but will be building new one soon

ckacyon · July 29th, 2002, 12:20 AM

Bad RAM, that sucks. I've been in that boat before too. I kept getting blue screens whenever I tried to install MS Office. Finally ran diagnostics on the system and it came back with a memory error. Swapped out the bad one and it was fine.