I got a brand spankin’ new, top-of-the-line PC this week. However it came bundled with XP Home, and in German, to boot. Not good for me.

So I have my (legal) multi-license Corporate version of Win XP Pro disc, which I insert and boot from. It loads all the drivers, then displays the “Starting Windows XP” and then gives me a blue screen that there has been some problem and it cannot proceed.

I thought about starting the installation on another computer, just the part about copying the installation files, then putting it back into the original computer to let it continue. But all of my other drives are IDE and this new one is SATA.

And I already tried booting up the installation program with the bundled XP cd and then swapping installation cd’s, but it always asks for the original one (which is in German!).

I also tried simply doing it from within XP, but it will not install to a lower version, since the bundled one is SP2 and my Corp Pro version is SP1!

Any ideas? I’m wondering about possibilities with booting from an external drive or something to copy the files… but haven’t come up with any workable combination…

Are you trying to install to an SATA RAID array? It will require that you give it an SATA driver on a floppy during installation (hit the F6 key as it’s reading the sotrage driver list).

I once got the bsod when installing winxp because of bad ram…

UPDATE:

Problem solved… I “borrowed” another copy off the net and used it start the installation. Then when the time came to copy the files, I simply switched the cd’s again. Duh…