win xp install

[damian]

Hi there:

Here is my issue I got a call from a friend of mine that his Dell Dimmension 4500s is not working. Once I got there his computer would go through post fine but than I get a message stating his WIN/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM

 

[damian]

WIN XP INSTALL

SORRY
The config/system file is missing or corrupt. I suspect Hard drive and get a win xp home edition disk and try to load from it. The problem is the installation hangs after "windows will now check your hardware configuration" and I can wait for a long time but nothing changes. I pulled his disk from the computer and put it into my computer everything works fine, I tried to put my working hard drive with win xp on it and I get the same message. I tried different cd rom but got the same message. Does any one has an idea of what could be wrong could it be a hardware problem and if so what could it be as I do not think it is the hard drive as it works fine on other computer. Thanks for any help.

 

[EricB]

did he try to bootleg aol? meaning did he try to change his name on the the aol account after his 2 month free trial (the one trial that didn't require a credit card) was up?

 

[damian]

Aol

He got the Aol antivirus few days before but I was there a week ago did some clean up and the computer worked great for a week and than this problem.

 

[EricB]

I am getting a lot of computers with this error and aol intentionally putting something in your computer to jack it up if you try to bootleg it.

I use a bart pe cd to recover the data to a usb hdd then I reformat it

 

[damian]

i can not reformat as windows xp gets stuck during installation as stated above---after i have to press key to boot from cd which i do i goes to checking my hardware configuration and gets stuck there, also if it was the hard drive a good one will allow me to log in but instead I get the same message-----Can't put blame on aol for this one.

 

[Osiris]

you need to use a windows 98 oem bootdisk to fdisk and format, then install it

 

[damian]

I tried that. With a different disk format was good but when trying to install xp i got stuck in the same place, and again putting a hard drive with a good win xp loaded should work, or if it was the hard drive why did it work fine when I took it from that computer and put it into a working computer. Sorry but this is really getting to me. Could it be the motherboard, I know he told me that he left the computer on the night before it went bad but when he came back the next morning the computer was off and upon turning it on he got the system file failure message. I've read info on google where people think it could be caused by hardware but was not able to exactly pinpoint to what it is and Microsoft is no help

 

[Osiris]

if you have more than 1 stick of ram, try taking one out and see what happens, if it still happens, try the other stick

 

[EricB]

yes it sounds hardware related