Sunday, February 19, 2006

Playing with computer bits

So

I thought I would get some of the PC parts in the garage together and see what works and what doesn't.

I have a test PC which I had previously built. AMD 1600+ on a gigabyte motherboard with 260mb SD RAM. I have tested the ram using memtest and found no errors.

So, I put it together with a spare 8 gig Seagate hard drive and a spare Liteon CDRW. BIOS recognizes all the parts so I start installing XP. At the file copying stage I get an error that it couldn't copy a file! I keep pressing enter but it will not go past this point. So ...

I replaced Liteon CDRW for a Sony CDR - same problem

I replaced the Sony CDR for a Ricoh CDRW - same problem

Replaced cable to CD - same problem

Tried different installation CD - same problem

Reset BIOS to default safe settings - same problem

Replaced Seagate hard drive with a Fujitsu 4.3 gig hard drive - same problem

How annoying is this?

2 comments:

Greg C said...

Michael

Possible problem with BIOS settings. Check: Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need assistance, contact your hardware manufacturer. This is from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp_
/using/setup/getstarted/troubleshoot_
.mspx

Ron & Laney said...

Firstly, you've inadvertently forced me to become a blogspot user, in order to post a comment!

Secondly, how big's the partition on the disk? The whole 8GB? or maybe there's a small partition up the front and you're running out of room? try the installation on another HDD if you can and see if the problem moves or stays where it is.

Cheers :-) Dr Ron