Weird XP Pro Installation Problem

[PanchoC]

A friend has a computer with XP Home, but he wants to use it on his work network and XP Pro makes this much easier with the ability to join a domain.

Anyway, the laptop is 3 weeks old, and a Gateway... he went out and bought XP Pro (upgrade edition) and after trying to install it he called me and said he was getting an error that it couldn't read the CD.

He said he called Gateway and they helped him for awhile and finally concluded it was a bad disc, so he got a new one.

This time, I went there to help with the install.

I found that when I booted from the disc and did a format on the drive and tried to install XP Pro, it would get about 35% of the way done before the CD-ROM drive would start making a lot of noise (grinding, loud clicking, etc.) and then XP Pro installation would error out.

It was the same error he said he had been getting.

So, what we did was restore the laptop using the Gateway discs and it worked fine. XP Home loads up, and then if you install the XP Pro upgrade through Windows XP Home, it works just fine. At one point during the installation the drive started making the noise again but it didn't error out.

Every other disc that I put in there works just fine with no weird noises or anything.

Does anyone have any ideas?

The actual error for the XP Pro install was something about "data cyclic redundancy" or whatever. It said this could be caused by a defective disc or a problem with the drive. I doubt it's a defective disc since he went and got a brand new one (what are the odds of that happening twice?).

It's possible the HD has problems but he said he was on the phone with Gateway support for a few hours and they went through all the checks (scandisk, chkdsk, etc.) and concluded it was a bad disc. This was before he got a new disc of XP Pro.

[shadowbreaker513]

Definatly sounds like a bad cd drive.

[PanchoC]

I suppose that's probable, but why would it work flawlessly when it was copying the data from the restore discs and reinstalling XP Home?

Why would it work fine when doing the install of XP Pro via Windows (aside from, as I said, a few seconds where it made a strange noise, but it did finish without errors)?

That's what I don't get. To me, it would either be inoperable at all times, or working at all times.

[fudtone]

I have found that installing a big fat windows OS will push a week PSU to its limits. You may have been experiencing some sort of power shortage causing the drive to flip out.

In once case I actually retried the install until it smoked the PSU in another I switched it (because I had one there) as soon as this happened and it loaded right up.

[glc]

It's a laptop, fudtone.

[macko72]

quote:
I found that when I booted from the disc and did a format on the drive and tried to install XP Pro, it would get about 35% of the way done before the CD-ROM drive would start making a lot of noise (grinding, loud clicking, etc.) and then XP Pro installation would error out

First you have saud that your friend bought UPGRADE editon of Windows XP pro and you tried to do "clean install" wich is kind a difficult to perform you can see how can be done here:http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/clean.htm
And trying of clean install probably gived your friends laptop realy hard time and that's reason for getting error message and all noises on your laptop.

[PanchoC]

From that URL, I did step #2. It didn't ask me to verify, probably because XP Home was already on the hard drive. I just deleted the partition and re-created it.

[macko72]

When you delete partition all data on that partition is lost and you need clean install of OS so you did try clean install with upgade disc!!!