Hello,
This is the first time I post on this forum because frankly I have never been this stumped before.
On my cousin's PC (which I was supposed to fix for him) there used to be a problem where the system crashed every time he turned it on, before reaching the windows login.
After many grueling hours trying to get in long enough to save his sensitive data (mission successful, after about 200 reboots sometimes from CD sometimes from HD), I have now the unhappy task of reinstalling Windows XP Pro SP2.
First of all, booting to the CD is not always successful. Sometimes I get a crash and it freezes, before I get the option to Install windows or repair the installation.
I managed to format the hard drive, create 2 partitions, 20Gb for the Main partition (where I intend to install Windows, Office, and other default programs) and a second partition with the remaining 180 Gbs.
The problem is, that everytime I start installing Windows on either partition (had to try the second since the first gave me trouble) it reaches about 80% and then tells me that a certain file failed to install and either skip it or try again (trying again doesn't work, and skipping 1 files might have worked, but this problem then repeats for more than a hundred files)
Does anyone here have a clue as to what might be the problem? I could get new Windows CDs, but I'm afraid it might be either hardware or bios related, and in this case I don't know what to do.