toshibia satellite won't install xp

[hobey19]

i am working on a toshiba satellite pro 6100. it had a simpletech 60gb hard drive that supposedly (according to the customer) no longer worked. it was replaced with an 80gb Seagate.

after replacing the drive, i used the recovery discs, and it got past the format stage and then it went to a completely blank black screen. i left it there for over an hour to make sure it wasn't just part of the process.

the weird part was that while formatting, it showed

Formatting 10,78.56M

i googled around, and found people saying the HD might be bad, so i ran a diagnostic, but it never went past the Welcome Screen on the seagate diag page.

so then, i decided to run a memtest, but as soon as it go into the application, it just froze and nothing ran. both of these tests were run from Ultimate Bootdisk.

after all of this, i figured i would try a different xp disc, just to see if that was the issue. i popped in my trusty XP Home disc, and it froze on

Loading Kernel DLLs

the laptop does not support booting from a USB drive. i was hoping to hook up an external optical drive to load XP that way. i am thinking there is something wrong with the built-in optical drive because it keeps
freezing up while stuff was running from it, but that could be stupid reasoning. any advice would be appreciated.

craig

[hobey19]

alright, as an update, i now have been able to start running memtest. it had 768mb of memory (512 and 256), so i took out the 512 stick since it wasn't the one that came with the computer. i am now running memtest on the 256. if it gets a clean bill of health, i intend to run it on the 512 just to make sure that that was the issue. seeing as how i couldn't even get memtest to run before, i am guessing its that. i had tried loading Kubuntu off the live cd, and it couldn't get passed Loading kernel. i had tried to set up a PXE server, and it worked on other computers, just not to load XP on the toshiba. it froze on Loading initrd.gz.

craig

edit: the 256 tested just fine. the 512 froze up after 6 minutes. i figured the 512 was the issue, so i put the 256 back in and tried to load windows. it got through the formatting just as before, and ended up on a blank screen just like before. i am out of ideas. any help would be appreciated.

[glc]

Will Seatools run now?

[hobey19]

got it all sorted. it turned out to be the 512 stick that was bad. i ended up putting the old hard drive in, formatting, installing and getting everything set up. i then imaged the drive over to the new 80gb one and all is well. no idea why it had to go like that, but its working and i have just ordered another stick of ram to replace the 512

the hard drive now tests just fine. no idea why it wouldn't before

thanks
craig