I’m helping a mate re-install XP onto his machine but have hit a stumbling block.  It does the first part ok, reboots and then does the second part up till there’s 8 minutes remaining and it’s ‘saving settings’.  Then it hangs and doesn’t go anywhere.  I can’t find anything on google which relates to this.

Hangs for how long? The minute indicator is definately not accurate. Also, you said re-install. Are you tring to repair a prior XP installation? Maybe you should just format & start fresh.

By reinstall I just meant that he had XP on the computer before.  I always do a format because it’s so much cleaner

I left the instal for about 30mins while having some dinner and it was still saying 8 minutes.  I’ve tried it several times with NTFS and FAT32 partitions, changing bios settings etc.  It’s also stripped it back to a basic rig and still no luck :(

Matt - you blew away all my theories. Maybe it’s a bad spot on the disk? Format doesn’t always catch these. I guess I don’t have a good idea on this one.  :(

I had a similar problem a couple of years ago….turned out to be a bad stick of memory.

Mighty,

Does your mates computer have any partitions. If yes, then merge them into a single drive and try again. It worked with on my old toshiba, for some reason the XP install would hang up every time and i had 3 partitions. I gathered them into a single disk and it worked.

Hope it works for you,
cheers.

Oh I forgot to mention that I’ve also run the microsoft memory test on his old ram and new ram (he was upgrading anyway, hence the reinstall).  Also used the Samsung HD utility to check the HD and that was fine.

I deleted all the old paritions off the drive and was just creating one 10gig windows partition during the windows setup.  I’ll try just using the whole hard drive…