Win XP setup does not copy all of the files

[Guest]

Hi everyone!
got a problem where by im trying to reinstall Win XP (on the old hard drive
and a new one that i bought as i thought the old hd died! which it hasnt..)
and it gets to the part where it needs to copy files to the hard drive before
doing the installation bit... i get to 2% or to 16%, even got to 45% and itll
come up with an error message "can not copy file to hard drive might be a
problem with the windows image?? or with your copy of win xp" or something
like that. u can either retry (press enter) or skip this file (F3) or exit
the setup. if you exit the setup then of course windows doesnt work.
so im stuck as to how to install win xp.
i have P2.8 pentium 4
huge hard drives (120gb and 160gb). been partitioned and formatted each
time. used the hard drive for win XP before and it worked perfectly. other
half thinks that its because i istalled iTunes - thats what broke my pc in
the first place
thanks for any help i get!! really appreciated!!
Cheers!!

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Sheepie.

Tell us a little more about your HDs. Are they typical IDE drives, or SATA
or SCSI or something else? Are you using RAID? Does your BIOS (and your
motherboard) support 48-bit LBA? That is, support for HDs larger than ~137
GB? (If not, that could be part of your problem on the 160 GB HD, but it
should not affect the 120 GB.) Are you using NTFS all the way? (You
probably know that WinXP will refuse to format a >32 GB partition as FAT32.)
How are your HDs partitioned? As a single partition on each? How are you
doing the partitioning and formatting? Are you letting WinXP Setup handle
it, or are you using the old MS-DOS programs FDISK and Format.exe? It is
not even clear to me if you are trying to install WinXP into Drive C: (on
whichever one is plugged in at Setup time) or into a different partition or
onto the other HD. And I have no idea if you are trying to REinstall WinXP
or to clean install it or if you are upgrading from Win9x/ME. Do you need
to preserve installed applications and data on your HDs?

Assuming a "typical" computer system, and assuming you simply want to clean
install WinXP onto a single partition on either one of your HDs, then this
ought to work:

1. Plug in the one HD you want to use, as Primary Master. Unplug the other
and leave it unplugged until WinXP is up and running.

2. Set your computer (in the BIOS) to boot from CD.

3. Insert your WinXP CD-ROM and reboot.

4. When WinXP Setup offers to repartition and reformat your HD, let it,
choosing NTFS all the way.

5. WinXP Setup should create the partition, assign the "drive" letter to it
and format it, then start installing WinXP. If it fails to complete, please
post back, telling us exactly what you did and exactly what error message or
other result you saw.

6. After WinXP is up and running on your first HD, you can shut down and
plug in your other HD as a secondary or slave. Reboot into your new WinXP
and go to Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Use Disk Management to organize
your HDs to suit yourself. Disk Management will create and delete
partitions and logical drives, assign (and reassign) drive letters, format
and reformat volumes. It will manage your HDs, CD/DVDs, USB devices such as
card readers and "flash" drives, etc. Disk Management can't do much with
the System Partition (where NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and Boot.ini reside -
typically C:\), or with the Boot Volume (where you put the \Windows folder,
this also is often C, but it can handle the rest of your disk management
chores.

an error message "can not copy file to hard drive might be a
problem with the windows image?? or with your copy of win xp" or something

This doesn't sound right at all. Is this a full retail WinXP CD-ROM? Or is
it a backup CD? Perhaps a slipstreamed WinXP+SP2 CD? Is it an OEM
"recovery disk"?

I don't see how iTunes could have anything to do with this problem. ;^}

RC