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[mooseantlers Profile]

Am having some issues trying to patch together an old computer system so the grand-daughter can use it for her learning 'games'.

This system has been around for a while. It from a company called ABS which has a 733mhz processor and a 1/2 gig of ram. I'm pretty sure that the motherboard is Tyan (?).

The initial problem was, when it went to boot up, it reported there was no operating system installed. Thinking the drive may be gone, I popped in a used WD 200gig drive that I knew was working fine. Am trying to install XP pro. When the cd drive became erratic (reporting that I needed to put in the disc), I swapped that out with one that I know is working.

The BIOS properly reports the cd and hard drive connected and have set the bios to boot from the cd. The initial start of a installation goes okay, can get past the EULA, delete the single partition & created a new one (using the entire available drive space) and then prompted to format the drive. The issues have arisen when Windows starts copying the files to the drive; it'll get about 11-13% of the way & then report that a file can not be copied. I'd be specific as to what file it is, but I can't as it's a random one every time (or at least appears to be). Knowing the consequences if hitting ESC to skip the file, i've done that 2 more times and get a different file name & then it crashes. Almost all the error messages on the blue screen indicate a page fault error . . however, one time it reported that something had attempted to use a thread it didn't own.

Before I go any further, I know the disc itself is fine. I used it less than 2 months ago when my main drive crashed and I had to do a reinstall. I'm not sure that me using my copy of XP is legal, but it won't get hooked to the internet (heck, this thing doesn't even have an ethernet port!) and it's only for a month or 2 until we can afford to spring for a complete rebuild or get a system 'off the shelf'.

And ideas that may help out would be appreciated & thanks!

[augie]

Two possibilities, your CD/DVD drive is faulty or your RAM. Run memtest86+ to see if your RAM is bad. Actually, something else maybe wrong too, it's just these two that pop into my mind ATM. I've had that issue and it was bad RAM, I hope it's as simple as that. Since it's an older machine, rub an eraser across the gold fingers of the RAM, may help.