strange windows reinstall problem

[killingspree]

well, my brother has decided to reinstall windows on his computer and obviously has f**ed up pretty badly. when he tried to reinstall windows (xp pro corp US) the computer always hangs at a certain step (after loading all the drivers) so he didn't have anything better to do than to manually format his c drive. unfortunately he now sits there with an empty c drive and can't install windows because it is always giving him a nice blue screen of death :/
it is no cd problem and not connected to the os version. we tried it with xp pro and home as well as 2k pro.

honestly i have no idea why this happens. i've also tried installing it on a old 6 gig hd with the exact same results. so it is definitely not a hd problem. also when booting with knoppix the hd is perfectly accessable :confused:

some system specs:
asus P2BS MB
dual PII 400
2x IDE hd IBM 40 Gig at primary master & slave
1x SCSI Pioneer CDRom
1x Aopen cd burner (IDE- scondary master)
1x Liteon DVD 12x (IDE sec slave)
256 SD ram
elsa erazor II (TNT chip)
TV card
creative soundblaster 128
PCMCIA adapter card with WLAN PCMCIA card
3COM 10/100 LAN

any suggestions on how to get windows installed onto this computer would be greatly appreciated!
thanks
steVe

[erbuk]

Unfortunately my advice involves using a screwdriver. But if you have nothing against that and havent tried this yet then remove all add-ons like the SCSI-card (or just the cable if it's got scsi on board), wlan-card, soundcard, one of the ide-cd:s and the secondary harddrive. If you have more than one memorychip then just keep one of them. Just keep the components needed to run the computer and install the os.

Then install XP and if it works reconnect the removed components one by one. Install the drivers and test each component before installing the next. This way you will find the component that causes the crash (if it's not one of the basic components that is).

[Lord of the Discs]

I know of a case where disabling the ACPI in the BIOS and choosing
a "standard PC" during install (pressing F5 instead of F6) solved
the problem. Maybe it´s worth a try if you don´t need the ACPI.

LotD

[ride159]

Test your ram.

www.memtest86.com

If the ram checks out OK and you followed erbuk's advice, well, I'm gonna have to think about it.

[killingspree]

thanks for the feedback guys...
I've solved the problem by installing the Os onto the HD from another computer, I still have no idea why it didn't work on the original computer, even with all compontents that were not absolutely needed removed. but everything works now, got to do a decent ram test though!

thanks again
steVe