Trouble installing XP

[Guest]

Hi Everyone,
My Mother in law has given me a P3 800Mhz, 512mb ram machine as she has
brought a new one.
It was running Win98 but was unstable so have decided to upgrade to XP.
I run a hard drive test utility (Maxtor) and done a low level format ready
to load XP.
Set the bios to read CD-rom 1st and put XP cd in and restarted.
Win XP set up starts and starts to load then the trouble starts like certain
files can't be copied.
Each time I try it stops at a different file and repeats the error like
“sys.dll can’t be copied, retry or continue without installing fillâ€
Pressed continue a few times but then gave up and tried from the beginning
again but the same errors.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Shenan Stanley]

My Mother in law has given me a P3 800Mhz, 512mb ram machine as she
has brought a new one.

It was running Win98 but was unstable so have decided to upgrade to
XP.

I run a hard drive test utility (Maxtor) and done a low level
format ready to load XP.

Set the bios to read CD-rom 1st and put XP cd in and restarted.
Win XP set up starts and starts to load then the trouble starts
like certain files can't be copied.

Each time I try it stops at a different file and repeats the error
like "sys.dll can't be copied, retry or continue without installing
fill" Pressed continue a few times but then gave up and tried from
the beginning again but the same errors.

Any ideas?

First - if it was unstable running Windows 98/98SE - it's not a solution to
install Windows XP. Not to mention - that is not a very powerful computer
to be running Windows XP. The 512MB memory will help, but the slower
processor will take away a lot from your experience.

Second - sounds to me like a scratched CD or a bum CDROM drive. Withthe age
of the system - I lean towards the latter - but it is simple to check the CD
for scratches/etc - so do that. After that - if you have a CDROM cleaning
kit - use it to clean the drive. If that does not resolve your issue and
you have another drive that you could use in that machine - try putting in
the different CD/DVD drive and using it to do the install...

 

[Guest]

Hi Shenan,

Wow thanks for the quick response.

I have a old Dell GX110 running P3, 733Mhz, 512 ram and runs XP fine so
upgrading this one didn’t seem to me as a problem.

I agree with you about upgrading just it was unstable but was hopping in my
heart it would be better.

Just had a conversation on the phone with M-IN-Law and she tells me that
sometimes a message used to come up during start up that windows couldn’t
find the driver for the CD-rom but she just pressed ok and carried on doing
what she wanted to do on the PC, so I will replace the CD drive with one I
took out of a PC I have which I replaced with a DVD-RW and try that.

Thanks

Paul