XP install errors

[prowler30]

Hello,
My daughter recently had a problem with her PC. I did the initial load of XP PRO on this system, and it has been running for months with no issues.
The primary symptom was the system would boot, go into scandisk, then the black screen comes up asking you to select the mode to start windows in. No matter what mode you selected, right back to the scandisk screen and so on etc...

I pulled the drive, slaved it to my system and did a full virus scan using McAfee 8i. No problems there, ran a scandisk, then used SpinRite 6 in an attempt to correct any errors in disk structure.
4.5 hours later, drive back in the original system, same problems.


Fdisked then formatted the drive. Booted to the XP PRO CD and commenced installation. Very early in the install, as the write process began I received the following:

Windows is unable to copy the file shell32.dll to the disk....(blah blah) press enter to try again F3 to quit install.

Tried enter, no go, F3 to quit.

Booted from CD and tried again, this time same error as before but with file ntdll.dll.

Tried with different HD, same problems.

Anyone have any ideas from here? MB, controller?

Thanks in advance.

[pip22]

Could be faulty CD reader. Can you lay your hands on a known good cd-rom drive and swap it over?

[prowler30]

Thanks pip, I'll give it a go tonight.

[Play_The_0dds]

make sure the cd that xp is on is clean, no finger prints or scratches. also in the bios, load setup defaults then after the install set them back to what you like or use performance defaults. if these options do not help you need to zero write/packet write/ or low level format (which ever you call it)the hard drive which will erase everything on the disk, even the boot sector. then use the xp disk to create the partition and format. if you have any crap in the boot sector or the drive has been formatted numerous times this will clean it up and should get it going again. windows utilities and formatting do not remove everything when used and trash builds up.