I'm trying to reformat my grandmothers pc, and for some reason it always stops at 34 mins remaining when setting up windows. I finally took it and put the HD on my pc to make sure it wasn't that, and it installed fine so i put it back in her pc. Now it won't boot xp and i don't konw what to do? Any ideas?

Had a somewhat similar situation, turned out to be a faulty power supply. Try using your power supply on her sys to check.

There is this procedure, be warned that sometimes works, sometimes does not:

1) Take the HD out of the "not installing" PC and put it on the other one

2) Phisycally unplug (or disable in BIOS) your "normal" HD and install Windows on the "other" HD

3) Select "Standard VGA" as video card

4) Once Windows is installed and running, go to device manager and remove, one by one, EVERYTHING, except:

Hard disk

Video card (VGA)

Keyboard

Mouse

5) Switch PC off

6) Put back HD to the "not installing" PC and switch it on

7) You will probably experience some re-boots

8) Do a REPAIR ( R ) install from CD, if needed

9) Let windows re-detect new hardware, give it, if needed, new drivers

BE VERY AWARE of the existence of different Hardware Abstraction Layer dll's (HAL.DLL):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;237556

You might want to add various boot.ini lines with the /HAL= switch:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Information/bootini.html

to cover the event that the HAL.DLL installed on one PC is not the same required by the other.

jaclaz

Edited August 5, 200521 yr by jaclaz