New System - winXP not installing

TDyl · 21 Jul 2008 at 18:43

Hi All,
I have recently bought these components from OC:

E8400 Wolfdale CPU
Abit IP35 Pro MOBO
OCZ 600W PSU
Thermalright SI-128 Cooler (with a 120mm fan)
Sony 3.5" FDD
Seagate 80gb SATA-II HDD (on SATA 1)
Samsung F1 750gb SATA-II HDD (on SATA 2)
4gb Corsair DDR2 6400C5
Sapphire 512mb HD 4870 GFX

All in an Antec Nine Hundred case.

My one cannabalised component is my multi-function Samsung DVD writer.

The machine boots successfully and winxp begins an install with correct recognition of all components. Once the drives have been partitioned and formatted (NTFS) winxp continues to install until it hits "39 minutes left" during the "device installation" section of install. The PC then reboots back to drive selection, partition and format.

I have tried 1gb and 2gb of RAM using all the stick combinations and I have also tried removing the FDD and using only one or other of the HDD's.

I am installing from an original XP disk and license with my micosoft SP2 disk ready for when I need it.

There are no net connections yet or any other form of network connection.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Regards
TDyl

pingwing · 21 Jul 2008 at 18:48

Is it a sata or ide dvd drive? On my p35 board it had some problems installing off my ide dvd drive (took ages to plow though some bios settings to get a windows install and a sata drive to get linux to work)

TDyl · 21 Jul 2008 at 18:49

DVD Drive

The DVD is the one IDE device on the system.

I've also tried loading optimised and safe bios settings to no avail.

TDyl

Dingleberry88 · 21 Jul 2008 at 18:53

Set your HDD as the first boot device in the BIOS.

postmanfw · 22 Jul 2008 at 00:33

Try running memtest (free progy

) for a while to check for any errors.

PhoenixUK · 22 Jul 2008 at 04:43

Change both HDD and CD cables ;-)

.
Had same problem turned out to be dodgy cable.

hp7909 · 22 Jul 2008 at 05:54

TDyl said:
I am installing from an original XP disk and license with my micosoft SP2 disk ready for when I need it

Any chance you can get hold of a copy with SP2 already? Or create a new Slipstreamed copy (see here).

EDIT: & for that setup, I'd seriously consider Vista 64-bit.

TDyl · 22 Jul 2008 at 15:28

Seems to be solved...

...after speaking o another techie at OC today. The RAM timings were manually entered and there were single step voltage increases for the RAM and CPU. The thing seems to be behaving a.t.m.

b.t.w. memtest ran fine for all 4 sticks and on the advice of the techie I'm going to take a hit on RAM addressibility and stick with 32-bit XP for the moment.

Thanks for your replies and I hope I don't have to post another request here for a while

TDyl