Problem Cant install Windows XP

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Right then, basically the mother in law has dumped her crappy old computer on me and asked me to fix it!
When i first tried to boot it up it came up with NTLDR is missing so i replaced it from the CD then NTDetect was missing so i did the same thing but this went on and on basically all the boot files and the entire registry was missing/corrupt so i decided to do a clean install of windows.

It loaded up the boot cd fine, so i made a new partition, formatted then tried to install.
It will get about halfway through then fail on a certain file saying setup cannot copy file X press enter to retry or esc to skip, tried retry didnt work so skipped it and then it fails to copy every other file!

I have used three different hard drives, swapped out the dvd drive for a known good one, and removed all the cards from the machine and still nothing.
I have even tried to install from my own windows xp disc just to eliminate that but it still wont install!

It is an old machine running a Pentium 2 cpu on a MSI MS-7060 Motherboard.
It was running windows xp home.

Any help would be much appreciated as i have run out of ideas!

 

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Can you run some diagnostics, such as testing the memory, CPU, etc... maybe via a floppy or CD that contains testing utilities?

If the HDD's have been swapped along with the CD and the drive, then to me it's not a case of bad media. However, some of those installation files that are copied to disk are found in cabinet files, and some CPU and memory is consumed to extract these files from the .cab's.

Could be at some point it just hits a snag due to a faulty CPU, motherboard, ram, or so on.

 

Unfortunately i dont have anything like that to test it with.
I have also gone into CMOS and restored everything back to default.

 

On the occasions that I've had this happen to me, it has been either scratched install media, or faulty memory.

Does the pc have 1 or 2 sticks of memory in it? If there are 2 sticks, try removing one of them.

NB

 

Ok good news, it was a bad memory stick!
All the things i tried and it was as simple as that!

Thanks for the help guys..

 

Glad you got it sorted.

The first time it happened to me was down to a dodgy memory stick. I spent ages trying different media , hard drives etc, until I tried swapping the memory.

NB

 

It is surprisingly often a bad mem stick. As the install loads a lot of data to ram, it eventually hits the bad chips in the sticks and then it all goes haywire.

Glad you sorted it out.

 

I've got into the habit of checking memory first after seeing this problem a load of times, first time I had an install fail due to bad memory though was actually Battlefield 2!