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Okay,

Here's a dilemma for you, I am very able with computers myself - I fix them and build them occasionally but I am literally stumped with this one.

My friends computer managed to get absolutely filled with spyware and viruses so my best course of action was to wipe the drive...the XP disc wouldn't boot up in their PC so I took their hard drive home with me and formatted it and installed XP here...however - it would turn out that their PC is one of these ones which don't seem to like booting up a hard drive other than one which has XP on it that was installed by itself (if you get what I mean - in in no foreign installed HDD's) so it reaches the xp boot screen and restarts.

I knew from the start that the problem was that the DVD drive in the pc wasn't up to much and that was why the xp disc would not boot before so now that I had worked out that this pc didn't like foreign installs I swapped the dvd drive with one I know works..I then booted the XP disc up and went to format and install XP again - the setup reaches the blue screen with "Windows XP Setup" in the top left and then hangs after doing the "checking system hardware" step.

I can confirm that it is not a problem with the XP disc OR the new DVD drive.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Hello Pootsey,

It's actually a well know fact that you cannot install XP on one PC, and expect the installation to work on another PC. XP will only work on a PC that it was originally installed on, unless the hardware (specifically the motherboard) is identical, or very very similar in make and model. The only other exception is if your installing Windows 9x, but even then the result was often poor performance from drivers and drivers versions that were not meant to be installed on specific hardware.

Is the HDD IDE or SATA? What is the make and model of the PC your having problems with?

Ooh that's bizarre, I've managed to keep one of my old HDD's with an XP install through three computers now...all with different setups and mobo's.

Anyway, The case is not branded with any specific model number but I can tell you it is a Packard Bell PC with an 80GB IDE HDD, that's as much as I can really tell you in its current state.

Can you seperate the HDD and CD-ROM, have one HDD on one ribbon cable, and the CD-ROM on another. Also disconnect any un-necessary hardware, other CD-ROM's, internal modems, USB devices etc, and then try again?

I sure can, I'll be heading round to my friends later today/tomorrow...is there anything else I can try if that still doesn't work?

Yes! If that fails, or even before you go over there, delete any current partitions that are already on the disk, using Windows Disk Manager or other such utility you may be familiar with. You can recreate a new partition later, however this can sometimes cause the very same problem. I believe this is the point where everything about the disk, boot record, partition and volume information is gathered.

Just a hunch here, but if you go to you're friends computer, see if you can turn of 'Anti Virus' in his BIOS. a reason you've having this problem could be that now manufactures of MOBOs and so on provide a BIOS antivirus to try to protect the MBR, this means any time you try to upgrade, down grate or re-install/format Windows the Antivirus thinks the Master Boot record is being effected by a virus. This is why you can START installing Windows, even if it’s the same disc the OS was installed from. it doesn’t matter.