XP locks up when installing

[Joshu]

Hey all, hopefully you'll be able to help me with this somewhat major problem.

Because games kept freezing 10 or so minutes in to play, last week I decided to format and reinstall XP. It came preinstalled on the machine, but I had experience with Windows 98 + 95 installations so I thought it would be real easy. Spent the weekend backing up, and sat down to reinstall on Sunday night.

Popped the Windows XP CD in, it checked my hardware and the options of installing, repairing or exiting came up. Tapped enter. Nothing happened. Tapped it a few more times, waited five minutes, reset the PC and tried again. Same problem. Took the boot CD out and went around some messageboards for aid. Someone recommended that I could use a Win9x boot disc instead. So dug my Windows 98 start up floppy out, set my BIOS to boot from the floppy, used fdisk to delete any partitions and formatted. Made a FAT32 partition, formatted again. smartdrv.exe, d:\, cd\i386, winnt.exe. Keyboard worked fine when I confirmed where the setup files were, but alas. Installation froze up as soon as it started to transfer the files. Spent the rest of the night retrying this.

So yesterday, just to make sure my hard-drive or CD drive weren't fried, I dug out my Windows 98 installation CD. Everything went fine. Put in my Windows XP CD, got the setup updates and tried to install that way. Yet again, the PC got stuck with the options of installing, repairing or exiting. Formatted AGAIN, installed Windows 98 again and chose to transfer the XP setup files to the harddrive. Same bloody problem, and I'm pretty much running out of ideas. I don't even know WHY this is happening, keyboard works fine in DOS, my harddrive is okay, so is my CD drive, and there's no hints that my Windows XP CD is messed.

Sorry if this was long winded, but people on other forums have mostly just directed me to basic installation guides which helped naught. =\

First person to help can have my soul, or something like that.

[Daeymon]

Cant you choose the boot from CD option, then enter the windows help utility on the disk. then use the format command from the command prompt. then reboot, then format again with a nfts file system, then install xp.

[Joshu]

I can't do anything when given the choices. Can't install, repair or exit. I notice that the Num Lock light goes off when the options come up, so I'm going to try installing XP with a different keyboard when I can.

[Daeymon]

good idea. I have seen a bad keyboard or mouse completely lock a computer up before. Its one more thing you can troubleshoot.

[badmash]

I am having the same problem. I tried everything as you did. I even updated my BIOS but still have the same problem. I have windows 98SE ,PIII, 1Ghz, 512 RAM. It meets all the requirements for installing windows XP Pro. I even downloaded a different XP from Kazaa to see if there is problem with my CD. It was also freezing my system. The freezing happen when it is installing and the progress bar shows abouy 32 minutes remaining. At this point the screen goes black and comes back ant then it is frozen. Nothing works after wards. It drives me crazy.