Installation Problem

[Phil Stevens]

I'm having difficulty with reinstalling XP Home Edition.
My computer originally had Windows ME that I upgraded to
XP home edition sometime last year. The install was
seamless and all was fine until recently (I kept up with
my virus downloads and had the Blaster patch on July 19 so
I don't think it's virus related). I started to get
serious error messages, dll errors, you name it etc..

Anyway, when it got serious last week, I used the boot
CD's that came with the computer to reformat and bring
back the original setting on the computer to the Windows
ME settings.

Then, I tried to Upgrade to XP Home Edition. This time, I
keep getting file copy errors during setup, retrying then
no result and either aborting or going through with the
process only to have the computer go into an XP startup
loop that continues ad infanitum.

The error message suggest the CD or the CD drive is
faulty; neither appears likely but I cleaned the CD, went
to the dealer to get another XP CD. They told me...
sorry, you have to call Microsoft to authorize another use
(I can only load XP Home Edition once).

That didn't sound right although I spent a half-hour on a
long distance call to Microsoft waiting for someone to
answer... then gave up. The drive seems to ok and before
I buy a new CD drive, I thought I'd try to post a
message.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

 

[Dave - Freedonia]

What you can try is to copy of i386 folder from the CD to your hard
drive and run winnt32.msi or after copying the folder, reboot into DOS,
change directories to the i386 folder and run winnt.exe.

By copying the i386 folder, you are putting the setup files on the hard
drive so you shouldn't get any CD error messages.

 

[Alex Nichol]

The error message suggest the CD or the CD drive is
faulty; neither appears likely but I cleaned the CD, went
to the dealer to get another XP CD. They told me...
sorry, you have to call Microsoft to authorize another use
(I can only load XP Home Edition once).

It is the Product Key that constitutes a license - and you could use a
different CD with it, but the shop would not have those, only new copies
with new keys - at full price for a different machine. The guy is
clearly confused in this - you can reinstall a retail upgrade like yours
any number of times, provided it is not on more than one machine at any
time.

It does sound to me that you have hardware trouble - what I would do is
copy the entire i386 folder off the CD onto your hard drive, together
with the setup.exe and then fro the ME run the setup.exe