Help installing windows XP! CRAZY problem!! Do you know why?

[kewidogg]

Ok, here's the scoop. I start burning a CD one day happily using windows xp. Middle of burning the CD, computer crashes. I restart the computer only to find my registry got corrupted beyond repair, and I had to reformat (lost absolutely everything). So I reformat and throw in my Windows XP cd to install it, but...it crashes. It brings up the blue screen, then loads a ton of stuff in the bottom status bar, but says nothing in the blue (where it usually asks if I want to format the partition, etc). At the end of loading all the crap at the bottom, it says "Starting Windows..." then my computer "beeps" (keyboard lights flash/mouse light flashes) *TWICE*, about 5 seconds apart, then I get a black screen and it's frozen. Here is the weird part. This is after reformatting (and f-disking) 2 seperate hard drives. Not only that, but it won't install on EITHER hard drive. So I throw in a windows 2000 CD. Windows 2000 has essentially the same install procedure, and again, does the exact same thing. So I try them in a different CD drive, same thing. Finally decided to install windows 98 (yuck) and see if I can't update to windows xp/2000 from a 98 install. Well doing so requires, yes you guessed it, a restart, to which it tries to do the same thing as a clean install, and thus freezes again. Has ANYONE had this problem before? Can anyone help me?!

[HAL9000]

Hmmm... interesting. There are a number of things that could be possibly affecting the install. Try resetting your BIOS to the defaults. You may also want to try removing all your extra cards (modem, NIC, sound, etc) and see if it installs that way. If that still doesn't work, it's possible that you have a RAM problem.

[kewidogg]

Tried already with the default bios settings, that didn't work, but I'll try taking other crap out and see if that works. Tell ya in a second :P

[HackinCowboy]

Try running MemTest86 - http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/
This will run a very extensive diagnostic on your RAM. Try taking out all the extra hardware in your machine and run setup with bare min.

[kewidogg]

Well, tried swapping everything last night, including all hardware (took EVERYTHING out except HD, and ram) and tried it, then tried swapping ram while all hardware was out. Exact same problem Also tried using the other CD rom, same thing.