help with xp install

Conroy Bumpas

we have some pc's at work that are very old run eather 2kpro or xp and have 512 ram or less but thats whats need to run our very old till program. one of the pcs died. and i managed to get my hands on a old pc. its was win me. and didnt run the till program. i have a win xp disc. (not a recovery disc) so i thought id install xp and sort it

pop in the disk it says set up xp. recomends formatting and setting up new partitions. i do this. gets to 20ish % of the install then says its missing a .dll file enter to retry or esc to skip. its does about 8 of these .dll files diffrent every time. then blue screens

any help welcome. ta

Conroy Bumpas

the pc is a pentum 4 1700mhz and has 512 ram

Conroy Bumpas

just swapped out the cd/dvd drive and a diffrent xp disk and still no luck

PedroAsani

The names of the dlls that are missing would be useful.

Conroy Bumpas

they are diffrent every time. some time it allows you to skip about 10 before it blue screens other times its only 1

Donovan Puppyfucker

Is the product key you are using for the version of Windows that is on the disc? Home, Premium, Professional etc.

PedroAsani

If the missing dlls are different every time, then here is a guess as to what I think is happening.

You are installing from the disk, and it is copying files to the hard drive.

The installer then says it is expanding/extracting files. This is the point it tells you things are missing.

So what I think might be the cause is that the copied file is getting corrupted. This could be a bad CD, bad CD drive, bad sectors on the hard drive or a bad read head. Diagnosing this kind of thing on a forum is less than optimal.

Do you have a second machine to test the install disk on?

Hevach

Pedro hit it, I think. Occasionally it can be caused by bad memory as well, but hard drive failure is my bet.

Is the XP disk legitimate or burned? Changing options on your burning software to burn at a lower speed can reduce the rate of file corruption on the CD.


Some unsolicited advise: computers that old can become moneypits fast - some memory here, a hard drive there, and 99% of your replacement parts will have to be used and equally old. I would suggest pricing options to either upgrade the software chaining you to them, or switching to newer computers and running XP in a virtual machine. Depending on what kind of ports it needs access to, some of the free options might even work.

Buttcleft

To build on what Hevach has said, you have to consider, if it is a hardware problem, what is a better use of money.

Spending 150 dollars to give an old computer a few more months of life, or 250 dollars to build brand new PC that'll last years.

Conroy Bumpas

the windows disk is genuine and it is not even getting to the KEY part. i also have a recovery cd with a full copy of xp on it and that does exactly the same thing. i thought i was the cd drive but its not. the hard drive in it was suposed to be "new" (old but never been used) think theres any milage is sticking in an old hard drive from another junk pc?

Essee

If it's not the CD, and it's not the CD drive (I guess you swapped it?), then most likely it is the hard drive, so trying another hard drive in there would be a good idea!

Hevach

Old but never used is still a crapshoot at that age. The odds are pretty good, but not perfect. Temperature changes, moisture, vibration, drops, static, shipping damage... A lot can go wrong with a hard drive in that many years. And you don't know for sure if the person you got it from was full of shit or not.

There is an outside chance it's memory. It's a weird set of conditions but I've seen it once. Could run a few rounds of memtest on it, or if there's more than one stick trying to install with one or the other at a time. My money's on the hard drive - I see more computers that old with bad hard drives than good. There's a good chance a SMART test (ultimate boot cd has several ways of doing this) will reveal this instantly: Just look for the Reallocation Event Count (attribute 194 or 0xC4). Anything raw value that isn't 0000000000-0000 means the drive's toast*.


*-Not necessarily immediately, modern drives have slack space to replace bad sectors - that's what the reallocation count is counting, how many bad sectors have been reallocated. But in 99+% of cases the first reallocation event starts the countdown to the inevitable, the problem will get worse until there's no more space to work around bad sectors.

Conroy Bumpas

right swapped out the hard drive and more or less the same thing... i coppyed down the names of the files untill i god bored the a few more presses and it blue screened

diskcopy.dll
diskpart.exe
diskport.exe
dispex.dll
displayp.chm
display.inf
dllhost.exe
dmadmin.exe
dmband.dll
dmboot.sys
dmcompos.dll
dmconfig.dll
dmdlqs.dll
dmdsemgr.dll
dmime.dll
dmintf.dll
dmloader.dll
amremote.exe

migt have spelt a few of those wrong

but that now
2 diffrent windows disks. 2 diffrent cd drives. 2 diffrent hard drives

Conroy Bumpas

pulled out one of the stick of ram at random. no missing files.

ta guys

Hevach

So to clarify, it did work without one memory stick?

Only the second time I've seen that (even with bad memory it's usually more all or nothing), but at least it should be a pretty cheap fix.

Conroy Bumpas

yeah its installed. ive now had all the problems of getting up to service pack 3 from no service pack. coz with no service pack it will only run ie6 and that wont opened windows update.

but yes was the ram!

should i just bin the stick i removed or is there any way i can test it?

PedroAsani

Now you have an OS in, you could download a memory testing program. But given that you solved the problem by removing it, why waste time confirming it's a dud: it stopped you installing before, that is proof enough for most people.

Hevach

Heck, it's better than memtest 86 to me - testing can be spotty, hence why the readme will usually say to run the test 12 times. If you put it back in, I'm betting you'll just get a BSOD.

Anyway, for SP3:
ISO:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=25129
Network installation:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24

I don't remember off hand if you need to go through the service packs in order, though, it's been a long time since I did an XP install that didn't have SP3 right on the disk.

Conroy Bumpas

thanks for all your help guys