Can't Install Windows XP on a IBM Thinkpad Laptop

[TomYoung]

Hi all:

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB), 256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand what
it is.

Thanks

Tom Young

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi all:

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB), 256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand what
it is.

Thanks

Tom Young

Have a look here:
WinXP Setup stops responding with 34 minutes remaining:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828267

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

What Pegasus said.

Are you using the CDs that came with the machine?

 

[TomYoung]

What Pegasus said.

Are you using the CDs that came with the machine?
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-IE, Mail, Security, Windows Desktop Experience - since 2002
AumHa VSOP & Adminhttp://aumha.net
DTS-Lhttp://dts-l.net/

No, this is a retail WindowsXP Home Edition, Version 2002, CD, which
includes, I believe SP2.

Tom Young

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

TomYoung wrote:

No, this is a retail WindowsXP Home Edition, Version 2002, CD, which
includes, I believe SP2.

I wouldn't attempt that with a laptop, especially a Thinkpad! Good luck
with that.

 

[Unknown]

You say 'fresh install', does that mean XP has never run on the laptop?
There is a lot of old hardware not compatible with XP.

 

[TomYoung]

You say 'fresh install', does that mean XP has never run on the laptop?
There is a lot of old hardware not compatible with XP."TomYoung" <[email protected]> wrote in message

That's what's puzzling. When I got the machine it was running WinXP
Pro, and running just fine. So, I wiped the hard drive and started
fresh. The WinXP Home CD is an upgrade CD, so I "showed" it my Win98
CD and off it ran, installing right along. I just can't get past the
35 minutes to go mark. I'd assume a machine capable of running XP Pro
could run the Home version.

Tom Young

 

[TomYoung]

Have a look here:
WinXP Setup stops responding with 34 minutes remaining:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828267

I've looked at the Help and Support page but, once I restart the
computer doesn't the install program start fresh .txt and .log files?
How do you get the install program to load windows enough to open the
command prompt without the program running off and re-writing what
you're trying to look at?

Tom Young

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I've looked at the Help and Support page but, once I restart the
computer doesn't the install program start fresh .txt and .log files?
How do you get the install program to load windows enough to open the
command prompt without the program running off and re-writing what
you're trying to look at?

Tom Young

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the machine
with a Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and run ntfsdos.exe
from www.sysinternals.com so that you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

 

[TomYoung]

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comand run ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comso that you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Thanks.

Tom Young

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process
several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comand run ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comso that you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Thanks.

Tom Young

Here are a few options I see for you:
- Use the factory recovery feature that is built into Thinkpads.
- Ask your local PC service person to load WinXP for you.
- Ask an authorised IBM/Lenovo service centre to restore your
disk to factory condition.

 

[Unknown]

What do you mean 'showed it your Win 98 CD'? Why didn't you get a Windows xp
instead of an update?

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process
several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comand run ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comso that you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Either use the WinXP CD(s) that came with the machine, the hidden Recovery
partition, or contact Lenovo Support, Tom. Good luck.

 

[TomYoung]

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Either use the WinXP CD(s) that came with the machine, the hidden Recovery
partition, or contact Lenovo Support, Tom. Good luck.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-IE, Mail, Security, Windows Desktop Experience - since 2002
AumHa VSOP & Adminhttp://aumha.net
DTS-Lhttp://dts-l.net/

I don't have the WinXP CD's that came with the machine and I wiped the
hard drive before starting the exercise of loading Win XP Home. I've
since determined that the hard drive probably is funky and that might
be the real problem here. I didn't even think of that since Win XP
Pro by all accounts seemed to be running fine. I may buy a new hard
drive and try the whole thing again, or maybe not.

Tom Young

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a
IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB),
256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com
combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand what
it is.

Have a look here:
WinXP Setup stops responding with 34 minutes
remaining:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828267

I've looked at the Help and Support page but, once I restart the
computer doesn't the install program start fresh .txt and .log files?
How do you get the install program to load windows enough to open the
command prompt without the program running off and re-writing what
you're trying to look at?

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process
several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first
restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the
machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comandrun ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comsothat you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Either use the WinXP CD(s) that came with the machine, the hidden
Recovery
partition, or contact Lenovo Support, Tom. Good luck.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-IE, Mail, Security, Windows Desktop Experience - since 2002
AumHa VSOP & Adminhttp://aumha.net
DTS-Lhttp://dts-l.net/

I don't have the WinXP CD's that came with the machine and I wiped the
hard drive before starting the exercise of loading Win XP Home. I've
since determined that the hard drive probably is funky and that might
be the real problem here. I didn't even think of that since Win XP
Pro by all accounts seemed to be running fine. I may buy a new hard
drive and try the whole thing again, or maybe not.

You'll still need the Thinkpad-specific drivers, Tom.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

That is possible. I just replaced the hard drive in my wife's Compaq
Presario R4025US for almost the same exact reason you are talking about. It
turned out that the drive was failing and once I replaced it I was able to
clean install XP Home from the HP/Compaq cd that came with the computer with
no issues and in a fraction of the time it was taking on the old hard drive.
I could eventually get the OS installed with the old hdd but within a day
the system would begin failing again. Anyway, as you recall from the KB
article linked by Pegasus, the 34 minute issue is hardware related and the
hard drive is a prime candidate. Good luck with it. And get your drivers
and utilities downloaded for your Thinkpad.

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a
IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB),
256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com
combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be
some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand
what
it is.

Have a look here:
WinXP Setup stops responding with 34 minutes
remaining:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828267

I've looked at the Help and Support page but, once I restart the
computer doesn't the install program start fresh .txt and .log files?
How do you get the install program to load windows enough to open the
command prompt without the program running off and re-writing what
you're trying to look at?

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process
several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first
restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the
machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comandrun ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comsothat you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Either use the WinXP CD(s) that came with the machine, the hidden
Recovery
partition, or contact Lenovo Support, Tom. Good luck.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-IE, Mail, Security, Windows Desktop Experience - since 2002
AumHa VSOP & Adminhttp://aumha.net
DTS-Lhttp://dts-l.net/

I don't have the WinXP CD's that came with the machine and I wiped the
hard drive before starting the exercise of loading Win XP Home. I've
since determined that the hard drive probably is funky and that might
be the real problem here. I didn't even think of that since Win XP
Pro by all accounts seemed to be running fine. I may buy a new hard
drive and try the whole thing again, or maybe not.

Tom Young

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

btw, I looked on http://www.restoredisks.com/finddisk.asp?mode=series for
you to see if RestoreDisks.com happened to have your software and the
closest is a Thinkpad 2289. You might ask them anyway.

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a
IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB),
256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com
combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be
some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand
what
it is.

Have a look here:
WinXP Setup stops responding with 34 minutes
remaining:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828267

I've looked at the Help and Support page but, once I restart the
computer doesn't the install program start fresh .txt and .log files?
How do you get the install program to load windows enough to open the
command prompt without the program running off and re-writing what
you're trying to look at?

The page I quoted requires you to restart the installation process
several
times. Apparently the process skips certain devices each time it gets
restarted. The page also says to press Shift+F10 after the first
restart,
which apparently opens a Command Prompt so that you can examine
pnplog.txt. If you are unable to do this then you could boot the
machine
with a Win98 boot disk fromwww.bootdisk.comandrun ntfsdos.exe
fromwww.sysinternals.comsothat you can examine pnplog.txt even
if it resides on an NTFS partition.

I've rebooted dozens of times and haven't made any progress. By
ejecting the Windows CD I can "stall" the install program and look at
the hard drive. There *is* no pnplog.txt on the drive, thought
there's a setuplog.txt file which doesn't show any obvious errors.
I've also view the setupapi.log file that shows all sorts errors,
variations of "#E077 Could not locate a non-empty section
[iis_common_install] when calculating disk space in 'C:\WINDOWS\INF
\iis.inf'. Error 0xe0000102: The required line was not found in the
INF."

All too much for me.

Either use the WinXP CD(s) that came with the machine, the hidden
Recovery
partition, or contact Lenovo Support, Tom. Good luck.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-IE, Mail, Security, Windows Desktop Experience - since 2002
AumHa VSOP & Adminhttp://aumha.net
DTS-Lhttp://dts-l.net/

I don't have the WinXP CD's that came with the machine and I wiped the
hard drive before starting the exercise of loading Win XP Home. I've
since determined that the hard drive probably is funky and that might
be the real problem here. I didn't even think of that since Win XP
Pro by all accounts seemed to be running fine. I may buy a new hard
drive and try the whole thing again, or maybe not.

Tom Young

 

[Daave]

Hi all:

Trying to do a fresh install on an older Thinkpad Laptop. It's a IBM
Thinkpad 2647-AMU with the following specs: PIII 700MHz (256KB), 256MB
RAM, 12.0GB HDD, 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD, 6x-2.3x DVD drive, 3Com combo

Setup hangs with either 35 or 34 minutes to go. It's got to be some
hardware issue and I was just wondering if anybody knew offhand what
it is.

Have a look at:

http://techtracer.com/2007/03/12/xp-installation-the-34-minute-hiccup/

 

[TomYoung]

Have a look at:

http://techtracer.com/2007/03/12/xp-installation-the-34-minute-hiccup/

Well now, this is more than a little bit strange.

Last night I wiped the laptop's hard drive again, (Darik's "Boot &
Nuke") and I noticed, after the progam was done, that there was a
message that there might be problems with the drive. (I'm pretty sure
that message showed up after the first time I ran Boot & Nuke, but I
just didn't notice.) So, I downloaded an Hitachi diagnostic program
and it, too, said there was a problem with the hard drive. Case
closed.

So, 1st thing this morning I bought another hard drive for the laptop
on eBay ("Buy Now"), and then wandered back over to Usenet to see if
anybody had anything more to say about the issue. Saw your post,
clicked over the techtracer.com and read the article and said "What
the heck, I'll try this one more time."

I inserted the Win XP disk again and, after it was satisfied I was
eligible for the upgrade, the program began formatting the hard
drive. Knowing this would take a while and expecting that things
might not work out real well I jumped on my bicycle and took a two
hour ride. After getting home, mopping off and drinking a couple of
glasses of water I stepped back into our "computer room" and read on
the laptop's screen "Setup will complete in approximately 33
minutes"!!!!! For reason unbenknown to me Win XP seems to have worked
through its issues with this laptop and seems to have sucessfully
installed, found drivers, etc. I'm writing this on the laptop now!

Very weird; maybe the computer knew I'd purchased a new hard drive and
decided to clean up its act.

Anybody need a "Working good" Hitachi 20GB hard drive? It should show
up in the mail in a few days.

Tom Young