OS re-installation nightmare, any suggestions?

Hello Eveyone,
A few days ago I had a thread up in which asking for assistance with my laptop. The problem was the no matter which internet browser I would use (IE, Chrome, Opera) the system would either lockup, become non-responsive requiring a re-boot or I would bet the "blue screen of death. The comuter is an Acer Laptop with 3 gigs of memory and Windows 7. The computer is about a year and 1/2 old and I have had no problems until now. I finally informed the thread that I thought that I had the problem solved and Oprea appeared to be working the way it should. Well, I spoke too soon for not long after the same problems were happening.

Fed up with the whole thing I said screw it and decided to restore the computer to the way it came from the factory. I have restore discs which I purchased from Acer (more on that in a minute) but decided to restore the computer from the hard drive as there is a utility that does it on the computer and all of the files and software needed were on the “D” drive, a partition of the “C” drive. I restored it and it took about 2 minutes of using IE to realize that the problem was stil there?! WTF!!! How can it still be there? I am now thinking that it has to be hardware related, but then how can it be? It only happens when I am using the internet with a browser (it doesn’t happen say when using iTunes to download songs). Well…

I think, perhaps maybe the information on the D partition is corrupted somehow so I go through my desk drawers and find the restoration CD’s that I ordered from Acer and start the restore process … or so I think. The restore process goes as it should for about 2% of the installation and the progress bars show 2% complete and 69% on the current file it is loading. At this point the CD drive is making noise (louder than when it read the rest of the disc) and the noise keeps going and going and nothing is happening. This goes on for 1/2 an hour with no change in noise or progress bars I terminate the installation. I try it again from the beginning and get to the same point with the same result. Great, the disc must be bad. I take it out and examine it and there appears to be no damage or scratches on the disc. I used these disc once before to restore the computer and it worked fine then. So of course at this point I am ready to explode, as I have spent a few hours on the thing and haven’t gotten anywhere.

So, at this point I say fuck it I will just install Windows XP. I have a copy that I purchased a few years ago and is not installed on anything so I might as well use it. I get it out of the box, pop it into the cd drive and start the install. Everything is going just peachy until I get to the part where the installation screen says “now testing your hardware”. At that point the stupid &^(&^^** computer powers OFF! Just shuts down and stays down. This is not a planned shut down on XP’s fault, no message that shutdown is happening and no auto-reboot. Just shuts right the fark down. I manually restart the computer and it looks like the install is going to continue. The XP program asks me to “press any button to boot from CD”, it then says “installing files”, then the “testing your hardware” message comes up and ARGGGGGGGG the stupid %&$#(#(# computer SHUTS DOWN AGAIN.

Now, by this time I am FOAMING at the mouth and so P.O’d I can’t even talk straigh. What in the every loving he** is going on? Is my stupid computer a brick now unless I pay Acer for a SECOND set of restore disc or pop a few hundred for a new copy of Windows 7? Is this a hardware problem of some kind, speaking of the origional problem, and if so how can it only affect the computer when I am using a browser? Why won’t XP install properly? It should install in a Windows 7 compter, right? Will John and Sue marry? Will Superman be able to save Earth? Why is my life such a pain in the ass sometime?:smack:

Thanks in advance for all your help. To you Mac users, as I asked in my previous thread please no “You should get a Mac because they rulz dude” comments. I don’t have a Mac and unless you are buying me one I don’t need the comment. I am not trying to be a jerk, but these threads never seem to happend without it developing into a PC vs. Mac debate. It isn’t helpful. In the meantime I am going to go hug Gunner the Great Dane to calm me down.

Update: My wife just read the post and says “Do you care about typo’s”… CARE ABOUT TYPO’S … I AM FOAMING AT THE MOUTH AND SHE IS WORRIED ABOUT TYPO’S…ARGGGGGGGGGGGGG I suppose that is the price one pays for marrying a teacher. I expect to find my monitor with red circles all over it!

Update 2: Hugged Gunner the Great Dane, kissed the wife and I feel a bit better. I tried my Google-fu and have come up with a possible explination, but I am not sure. Some are claiming that they are having the same problem installing XP. At one board the opinions are the laptop is overheating during installation and the suggestion is to let lappy cool down for an hour, remove battery and run install without battery on external power.

Now, I could see this as reasonable except: Why would an XP install cause on overheat severe enough to shut down the lappy? When it was working I had temp software installed and the temp never rose high enough to be a problem. Plus I am wearing shorts and lappy was on my legs and I didn’t notice it being hotter than normal. Secondly, why if it was an overheating problem, would lappy shut down exactly at the same point in the installation? I tried it several times and it always shut down at the same point.

There was also one reply that seemed to get ingnored, but might be the problem. (I am letting lappy cool down right now or I would have already tried it) It was said by this poster that you cannot install XP on a lappy that has a SATA hard drive. They suggested going into bios and change the hard drive designation to IDE. Now, this sounds plausable, but why would that be and can you change the designatin from SATA to IDE if it is a SATA drive?

Thanks everyone and my aplologies for the “F” word in the OP. I thought I typed “fark”, but in my foaming mouth induced episode it appears I went full moron. Mods, if that is a problem, can you change the “F” word to fark please?

Overheating is a possibility, but its not going to be from the installation. Are all of the fans working? Are your legs obstructing a fan since you mentioned shorts and bare legs? Could a fan be plugged up with dust/crud and needs to be blown out?

These would account for failures to install the O/S across multiple methods, but I have not seen your PC. Place your computer on a hard flat surface and hit the cooling vents with a little canned air and see if anything comes out.

Some older xp machines would not install to a SATA drive without a separate driver, I have not seen that for years and seriously doubt thats the issue. Nowadays the board knows how to communicate with a SATA drive without a driver.

Failure to reload windows is rarely a good sign and is usually going to be a hardware problem of some kind.

I don’t think that I have a heating issue as I blow the vents out once a week with compressed air to keep the dust at bay and as mentioned upthread prior to trying the re-install I had a temp monitor and everything was okay. Also, I noticed no noticable increase in temp from what I could feel (I understand a really bad way to take the temp measurment, but on other lappys I could feel when they were running hot).

I re-read the tech thread on which I found the two suggestions and some people have claimed success in taking out the battery and setting the lappy up on books to increase airflow. Will it work? Who knows, but as you said, I find it hard to believe that the installation of an OS, XP in particular, would cause a lappy to overheat. However since I have nothing to lose, I wil try it with the battery out to see what happens. If it is the culprit I will advise in a follow up post.

You maybe correct here, although I hope not. As mentioned before I never did solve the browser crashing problem and after restoring the lappy the first time thought it might be hardware related, but what piece of hardware? Replacing components one at a time could get quite expensive. Thanks!

The things I’d check would be:

heating issues (fan, air vents, dust)
memory

A failed RAM module can often cause crashing and random behaviour. If you have multiple RAM modules, you can take one out to test and see if it works. There’s also the very useful Memtest, which you can download and burn to a bootable CD, which will test your memory extensively without needing Windows or any other OS.

OP - The suggestion above to check your RAM is good. Another thing you can try is to use another hard drive for the OS installation. I suspect that you have a hardware problem that will require a methodical approach to isolate the exact cause.

Update Day 2: Well, got a few hours sleep in between tossing and turning as I was chased in my sleep by various computer components. I got up fresh, ready to get this done. I unistalled the battery, made sure the lappy was plugged in and went to work. SUCCESS! … oh wait.

The install started again, went pass the point of yesterday and looked as if I had done it. The install got to the point were the installation screen said “Starting Windows”, then the Blue Screen of Death promptly displayed itself. ARGGGGGGGGGGGG PART DUEX. I tried it again and got the BSD at a different point, but close to the same. So, I don’t think that I am dealing with a heat issue here because the computer was only on for about 10 minutes. But, if I am not dealing with a heat issue why did the install continue this morning when the computer was cold? I AM SO CONFUSED.

So, at this point I am letting lappy sit in case it is the heat and I will attempt to restart the install process in a bit, as it seems as if a little more gets done each time. If that fails, I have a dead HP lappy that I will grab the hard drive out of and swap out the drives. Which brings me to another question. The HP drive has the OS on it, but is not configured for the Acer. What happens when I put it in the Acer lappy? Will it boot with the OS or do I just keep the XP installation disc in and format the drive and install the OS (I will install the OS fresh no matter what, I just didn’t know what would happen.)

At this point I am going to discount the heat theroy as I don’t think that is it, although I still can’t figure out why letting the lappy sit overnight I was able to proceed farther. I am going to assume it is hardware related. Before I swap the hard drives I think I will try taking out the memory, hopefully it is two sims. If it isn’t I will have to see if the memory in the HP is compatible. If not I will make a boot disk and run the memory testing software as suggested above.

Once again, thanks to everyone for their imput. I am sure that I will eventually get this fixed, it will just be a frustrating process. Gunner the Great Dane keeps looking at me funny as he knows something is stressing me out, but then he goes right back to chewing on his toy and forgets about me.

Completely agree… It sounds like either a memory or hard drive issue, and more than likely memory. The good news is that memory is relatively inexpensive, and it should be fairly easy to swap out.

Memory can sometimes get flakier when it gets warm; which could be why it works until it gets hot. With Blue Screens of Death on a clean install? Very good chance it’s the memory.

The last time I had a “WHY WON’T THIS FUCKING OS INSTALL??? WHY DO THE ERRORS NEVER REPEAT??!” moment it was when I was trying to install an OS on a bad hard drive.

As I said in the first thread, a BSOD is a hardware fault 99.9% of the time. There’s some good advice in this thread on how to isolate what component is at fault (I guessed overheating video card in the other thread.)

It bugs me whenever I see someone trying to recommend a *software *solution to a BSOD, because those never work. Thankfully, this forum seems to be on-the-ball.

Would it help to try running a Linux Live CD (without installing)? If it’s memory it would still crash, and if it’s the hard drive, it should run OK. Maybe you’d get a different, more informative, error message.

I sent you a PM, but want to state that I agree with those that say BSOD is Usually from hardware woes.

Memtest would definitely be worth a look see but if for some reason you cant do that.

Since you have 2 sticks of ram, try repeating the load after removing one. If that fails, try removing the other stick and putting the first one back in.

Annoying but if you have a bad stick that will isolate it.

The blue screen usually has some codes. The most relevant portion will be the first block of numbers 0x0000007B for example.

Also near the top of the screen there may be a more clear english error message like UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME or IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Quibble, 99.9% on a windows install.

I see alot of BSOD activity from virus and software/driver conflicts with windows updates and such. Outside of an install IME, I would still say 75% hardware issues.

As has been posted, the problem is likely hardware (probably disk or RAM). You mention a BSOD a lot though, and unless my speed reading fails me, you never posted the actual error msg. If you can’t get it going, let us know it.

You are right, the error codes would probably help. The problem is that when I get the BSOD, the computer usually will shut down by itself leaving little time to try and get the error codes. I have tried to boot this morning, but it won’t go to the installation screen. Instead I get a text warning that looks like it is from the BIOS judging from the black on white text (I wil keep trying to load and if I get to the BSOD I wil post). The “BIOS” error I am getting reads as follows:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

  1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
  2. Choose your language settings, and the n click “Next”
  3. CLick “Repair you computer”

If you do not have this disc, contact your systems administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.
Status: 0xc000000f

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

So, it sounds like it isn’t accessing the CD drive now. But because this computer hates me, I just shut down and restarted again and now it is reading from the CD drive just fine, so in a few minutes I will have the BSOD error to post. The BSOD comes right as XP setup get to …WAIT WAIT WAIT.

It appears to have gone this time even further in the loading of XP than it did last time. It did give me the BSOD, at the time it was loading what appeard to be drivers, ie: it was displaying things like “loading SCSI Interface”, “Loading Floppy” etc, then BSOD. The error screen reads as follows:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you’ve seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen apears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newely installed drives or hard drives controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK/F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information:

***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78D2524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
Well, that is it and I am convinced from what I have heard hear that the problem is most likely the hard drive. So, two questions:

1: Could it be a simple as letting CheckDisk scan the drive and repair corrupt sectors? If so, how can I run it, for there is no “DOS prompt” and I can’t seem to find any type of GUI way of running it. The XP installation disc always starts from where it left off, so I can’t seem to be able to run it from there.

2: I am going to pull a hard drive out of my old HP lappy that is in need of a new power port and thy it. I am unfamiliar with lappy hard drives, are they all universally compatable with each other?

Thanks again for the help, you all have done more than I thought you would!:wink:

UPDATE Day Three … wearyness is setting in, food supplies good but can’t shake the feeling that my computer hates me.

Okay, here is what I did since last post. I found a utility online called “Barts PE” that enabled me to make a boot disc using information from the XP Installation disc that would allow me to run chkdsk to see if the drive was corrupt and could be recovered. I burned the bood CD with no problems and put it into Lappy’s cd drive. The program started running and it looks as if I was going to be able to run chdsk and verify that the hard drive is good or bad. Then as it is running the neccassary files of the disk I get the Windows XP logo, the one you get when XP starts on a working computer. Then …ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG BSOD, with the same error codes as before.

Flying Spaghetti Monster on a crutch. Why in the name of all the is Holy would I not be able to run this program and run chkdsk? It is just a minor utility and should run with no problems. Does this confirm that the hard drive is toast? Anything I can do. What does the start of an ulcer feel like, I think I am getting one.

It is not a software issue, it is a hardware issue, most likely RAM as Hard Drives are quite good at reporting when they are failing these days. The overheating theory may be true too, it doesn’t matter if you blow it out if the fan motors die (actually something that can be hastened by blowing it out by the way)

Download an ISO from here and run it to see if it is a RAM issue.

http://www.memtest86.com/download.html

When a machine crashes with multiple different OS’s or a fresh install it is typically a hardware issue or something that will not be fixed by re-install.

You probably don’t want to do this, but the HDD shouldn’t be too hard to remove. It’s almost certainly 2.5" format. The only issue then would be if the interface is SATA or IDE. Either way, you should be able to attach it to a desk top computer and run a program to check the drive health. There are several freeware programs that will report on the SMART statistics and tell you if the drive is dieing. I did a quick search on ‘smart hdd freeware’ and this was the first hit - What is a S.M.A.R.T Technology - NTFS.com