Alright everyone this might take a few lines...I have a problem with my
friend's computer that I cannot resolve.
His computer was running Windows ME up until recently when one
morning he booted it up and it said "file missing or corrupted:
vm32x.vxd". Anyway, his floppy drive was fried and wouldn't boot from
a bootdisk to repair this problem so instead I took the hard drive out
(and put it as a slave in mine) and re-formatted it with an ntfs file
system. I then placed it back in his machine and tried to install
windows xp.
This is where the trouble began. It would boot from the cd and run
through the first part of setup until the setup reboots the computer.
Upon reboot it would tell me that there was an "error reading disk" and
would do nothing more. No other options on the setup disk would work
so I took the hard drive out again and put it in mine as the master
where I ran fdisk from a windows 98se bootdisk and went about
installing xp from my machine.
This worked beautifully (thus eliminating the hard drive as the
problem) and xp was setup in no time. However, when I put it back in
his machine it would freeze right before it got to the Windows XP
loading screen. All hardware was detected by the bios and everything
went great until it froze. I restarted in safe mode and as it was
going through the loading of the files, it froze about 2 or 3 seconds
into it. And this is as far as I have been able to test.
The machine in question is running a p4 2.0 ghz processor with 256
mb of ram. The xp was not sp2 as far as I am aware, but it was an
upgrade disk. I'm not exactly sure about the brand and speed of the
mainboard but I can get it if needed. My machine that the setup was
successful in has 512 mb of ram with a p4 2.6 ghz processor and an ASUS
mainboard with 800\533 mhz fsb. Don't know if there's more information
needed but I can get it if you need it.
The question is, what is wrong with this machine? I'm assuming it's
hardware, either the memory or the mainboard but don't really know
which to try. The computer was in a working state until it was booted
up one morning to not be able to find windows me, so I'm stumped. Any
suggestions would be great. Thanks, KS.