Can't Reinstall Xp Pro

[lizajane]

Hi folks - I'm new , and yes got a problem.

I've reformatted my PC (came new 6 months ago with stand alone XP Pro - pretty high spec - P4, 1GbRAM). Have tried reinstalling XP Pro from the Boot discs and get a message involving "value 0 on the line in section [sourceDisksFile] with key SPI.cab".

Have tried reformatting again from DOS, have now removed all my partitions and reformatted, and then tried loading my WIN 98SE, whic will only boot in Safe Mode. Only glitch I can find is that the available disc size seems to be about 8MB les than it should be - (152.6 onstead of 160Gb).

Any help much appreciated.

[^_^]

well, I did a little googling, and it seems you aren't the only one with this type of problem

unfortunantly, there also didn't seem to be any answers either

some suggestions were the ram was faulty, the cd/dvd drive was faulty, or the cd itself may be faulty or dirty

if you know someone else with the same version of windows, borrow their cd but use your serial number

otherwise you may have hardware issues

I also searched the microsoft knowledge base with no success either

[seapagan]

Sounds like you may have a faulty XP install disk - is it a 'recovery' type CD provided by the manufacturer, or a plain vanilla XP CD? As suggested, try another XP CD from a friend. Looking at the error message, that looks like it should be 'SP1.cab' not 'SPI' .. guess that is a typo? Be aware that some modern PC's need extra drivers and software provided by the manufacturer to function fully.

For the 8GB size discrepancy, I have noticed that XP leaves about 8 gig at the end unpartitioned on my systems sometimes, depending on what partition layout I use. Also, manufacturers quote drive sizes as unformatted capacity, it is slightly less once formatted, and they generally use 1GB = 1000 Meg while winders uses 1024 Meg.

For the Windows 98 SE, I am not sure if that OS can support hard drives of 160 Gb, maybe that is the problem. Try making a smaller partition for the OS - only partitition say the first 40 gig as a primary partition and leave the rest blank , see if that helps 98. Otherwise, the problem could be that 98SE does not have drivers to support your hardware (especially if your computer is so new). When you are in safe mode, look at the device manager in control panel, see if any are giving errors and try to get new drivers for 98 if so.

SP

[raza]

About the hardisk .Whenever you format a hard disk first time u will lose some of its memory forever.No help could be done in this case I think.

[would]

have you check you hardisk?are there any bad track there?

[jeffshen]

how did you manage to format a 160gb hd into 160 gigs to run in win 98 from dos? i used PMP and used a 100 gig... that was no problem, win 98 working fine with that... and 512 ram... after installing 98se2me

[lizajane]

Thanks to you all:

Problem solved by hitting delete enough time during the attempted boot from the CDROM.

CDs are gen - came from a good retailer with the PC.

Agree about Win98SE not working on a big HD - but was desperate at that point.

great forum - thanks again