Okay I'll try to keep this short and informative:

Got given a PC to fix, Dell Dimension E520, guy said he wanted XP re-installed but the version he had told him it was older than the current version he was running.

When I got the PC there was two option during boot up XP home and XP Pro Setup. I tried both just to see where I was, home loaded fine. XP Pro Setup said: Windows has shutdown to prevent damage.... yarda yarda yarda unplug your HDD's/Controllers, run CHKDSK /F, check for viruses etc.

So I started from the top and intserted my XP disc, everything was fine untill after drivers had been loaded then I got the same error.

Next I unplugged the disc and connected it to my other machine and formatted, blank disk should be okay hopefully... I was thinking.

Popped it back into the Dell, hit the same problem, then figured I'd try unplugging the HDD and trying the install again, hoping windows would detect that the guy at the keyboard didn't have an HDD connected (its a single HDD rig), I got the same message....

Cleared the CMOS (you never know!) tried again same message, tried another XP pro disc... same message.

So now its back out the DELL and sat in my machine with CHKDSK running, i'm gonna try a virus sweep too... but i've got a nagging feeling the disk isn't the problem due to getting the same error message even when the drive is unplugged.

I must be missing something here, I've worked on alot of machines but I've been pretty ill this last week, am I missing something obvious, any suggestions?

Cheers in advance

Gibsey

Hey, Gibsey, and welcome to PCHF!

I've changed your thread tag to [Open] so a Tech team member will see it and help. I'm also going to re-read the thread and subscribe to it in case there's some advice I can offer you in the matter. If not, one of our Techs will have an answer. Good luck!

Rodents210

Thanks, good to see a community at work.

Gibsey, I may be missing something, but I notice you mention two different errors in your post. Which one are you currently getting on bootup?

sorry i know how important these error messages are, i can swap the drive back and reboot to make sure its right (after I've had some munchies ) its always the same error something along the lines of:

Windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this error restart your computer, if not try the following:

removing the hard drive or controllers, running CHKDSK /F or check for viruses

STOP (Something,Something,Something,Something,Something ,Something,Something)



But stated in a more Microsoft way.

Cheers

That Stop message can be pretty important. The hard drive is connected to another computer, correct? Is that computer capable of reading from the drive, or is the HDD protected?

My reason for asking this is that if there is any malware on the machine, we can have our security team help remove it, and if needed we can get the dump files from the Stop Errors to more specifically diagnose the issue. However, we don't want to get these files right now if there is a risk of infecting another machine.

I'm pretty sure you need to use the Dell Recovery disks (but if you don't have them further research required) because the disk is SATA and on the Dell needs its RAID drivers/configuration enabled etc.

http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/NH730A01.pdf