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I recently bought an external 160gb USB harddrive, I intended to use the HD to store my MPEGs, MP3s, photos & games.
I transferred all of my MPEGs & MP3s to the new drive and they all work fine.I then uninstalled all of my games in order to reinstall them on the new drive. I then attempted to reinstall the games (GTA San Andreas, Star Wars Battlefront, Doom3, Sims2) on to the external drive. Upon installation each game gets a few minutes into the installation process before my PC freezes up and I have to manually reboot. This happened with all of the games on several occasions.

After several attempts I decided to switch off the external drive & reinstall the games on to my primary HD, however now the same thing happens when attempting to install to that HD too with 2 of the games (GTA & Doom3), PC freezes up after 5-10 mins of installation. All of the games were originally installed on this drive with my current setup without any problems. 2 of the games (battlefront & Sims2) reinstalled fine on my original HD, so once again I attempted to install them to the new drive & PC frooze up.
Also the PC has crashed on 2 occasions, a blue screen momentarily appears with lots of text (I have no idea what is says, its only on screen for a second) and the system reboots itself, this happened when the PC was connected to Kazaa and on reboot the file I was downloading has completely disappeared.
The PC is around 2 years old, has a 2.6ghz processor and 512mb of RAM and a Geforce FX 5200 gfx card. I have never had any problems until now although I have noticed that the PC hasn't been shutting down properly recently on quite a few occassions, having to be manually powered off.

So far I have tried the following, none of which make any difference to the installation problem;

• Formatted the external drive
• Ensured Virus definitions are up to date and done a full scan (Norton)
• Emptied Windows 'TEMP' folder
• Updated 'Installshield' engine
• Checked that I don't have a bad stick of RAM using DocMem
• Ran Scandisk
• Scanned with Ad-Aware & Spybot
• Increased Virtual memory size

Can anyone please offer any advice or assistance at all?

Welcome to PCHF

Sounds like you may have either missing or corrupt system files there. You have done a great deal to find the source of the problem but I think that there are 2 choices available to you.

1) You could try a system files repair: Grab your XP Cd and go to Start > run. Type in scannow /sfc and hit enter

2) When was the last time you completely formatted and re-installed Windows on your primary drive? It could be your best bet here...

Do the problems also remain after disconnecting the external HD? Or can you install normally again on the old HD then?

The PC came preinstalled with Windows Xp so I do not have access to the CDs & have never formatted the primary HD in order to re-install windows, is there any way I can get hold of the CDs?

Yes the problem still occurs when I do not have the external drive attached, I am now unable to install the games to my primary HD.


A guy on another site said that games should not be installed on external HDs & that by doing so I have created invalid/corrupt registry paths which is what uis causing me problems?! does that sound correct?

I dont think that would be it , but try running a reg cleaner:

install and run RegSupremePro. It will want to make a backup of your registry , let it. Once it has finished, click on the Registry Cleaner tab, select Aggressive. When it has completed, click on Select, choose All. Click on Fix, and let it fix everything that it finds.

http://www.macecraft.com/downloads/