Reinstall Windows XP - Problems

[Tom56]

I am attempting to assist a friend fix their computer. We tried running the Windows XP disk as repair however there were issues so we tried a full reinstall and there are issues there as well ending a blue screen with a fatal error etc. Now I came home and did some investigation on the Net and came up with some possible problems. I know this individual aded new RAM and I learned from my search that if not installed properly could cause problems. Also the XP CD may be faulty so I am going to try my copy of XP and see if that works. I also found out that it could be an error with the CR ROM and that the system can not read from it, so I am going to take one of my CD ROM and give it a try. Any other possible solutions anyone else may have? I thought a clean reinstall would do the trick but I was wrong. Since there computer is pretty much out of service I would like to get it working since my attempts so far haven't helped much.

[shadowpr]

Please list the parts, make and model, including power supply.

Also, tell us what the stop code is on the blue screens. That can ofer some insight to what the problem is.

[rjfvillarosa]

As shadow has suggested give us some idea of the machine your are fighting with.
In the last few days I have had two machines with bad harddrives giving me BSOD's during a reinstall.
Try and find out what make of harddrive is fitted.

[Tom56]

The owners are not too sure what their machines has excpet that it doesn't work. During the boot up it looks like a Maxtor HD and I am guessing about 160G and 1G stick of RAM. After reformatting the drive the OS was on, we did a clean install and used my XP CD SP2 and while everything went reasonably well, there were some files that it couldn't load and we had to by-pass. In the end when it boots back to the Windows logo screen and then it should go to a blue screen where you finish the install, this was displayed, "Stop: C000021a (Fatal System Error) The session manager initialization system process termintaed unexpectedly with a status of 0xc000026c (0x00000000 0x00000000) The system has been shut down. I was certain the clean reistall would have done the trick.

[rjfvillarosa]

From what I can find in the Microsoft tech forums this stop code "C000021a" refers to a bad dll file.
At a guess I would suggest it is one of the files that didn't copy correctly and I am certain this is being caused by a bad harddrive. Either download the manufacturers diagnostic utility or download the UBCD (ultimate boot CD) this CD contains lots of diagnostic tools for the harddrive, ram and motherboard.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[juppy]

I agree with what rjfvillarosa said, but wanted to add one thing you might try first. You said they had added new RAM....was this when the problem started? And if so, did you try taking the "new" ram out and just using the old ram to try and reinstall XP? If that doesn't work, then yeah, what rjf said.....the hard drive might be failing.

[glc]

In addition to hard drive diags, you should probably run memory diags too.