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Win XP Home installation "stops"
Hello. I have an 18 month old Inspiron 6400 which had an HDD failure. Having replaced the drive (SATA 120GB) I started to reinstall Windows. Since the recovery/drivers CD/DVDs were not shipped with the machine, I used another WinXP Home install DVD from another (desktop) machine.
Now the fun starts... The WinXP install proceeds as normal and the files are copied to the new hard drive. The installer then attempts to reboot, but the machine does not actually reboot, and the machine requires a poweroff/on to do this. Not too big a deal, but wanted to mention this.
Anyway, when the machine does restart, the installer continues apparently as normal and restarts the install. It then enters the "Installing Files" phase and with about "34 minutes to go" the screen goes black. The machine requires a reset with by holding down the poweron button to get it to restart. After it restarts, it goes through restarting the install with exactly the same symptom.
Any ideas? (I am just about to retry it, and then have a look at the hard drive on another machine to see if there are any logs which might give me a clue as to what is happening).
Thanks, Phil
GioAguilar
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Posted January 2nd, 2008 14:00
That's the problem... Even being the same Version, they are diferent...Dell provides an OEM version of Windows, Microsoft will provide a Retail version. The best advice I can give to you, is to get another XP CD (Dell version) to avoid this kind of problems.Another problem you'll be facing: if you do not have the product key for the other CD, any advise we can give will be useless. The Product key you have on your computer is for OEM versions, not retail, so it will not work.Doing some changes, probably you can install that XP version, but, do you have the product key label for that CD...???- Thanks. Yes, I understand that the versions may be different, but since there were no CDs distributed with the Inspiron, there were not a lot of other options open to me. (I have actually used the same CD to reload a Dimension desktop where my original recovery CD was faulty, so I was hopeful it might work - I do have the product key).I have since contacted Dell support, and have requested some backup disks which they are sending me.I still think there may be something else at play here - I guess I'll have to wait the 5-10 days for the CD's to arrive to really find out... I wish I understood why there seems to be a Dell policy on not distributing the CDs with a new system - talk about making life difficult!Phil
- Phil4917,Ah, the infamous 34-minute hiccup! See this on how to work around it: http://techtracer.com/2007/03/12/xp-installation-the-34-minute-hiccup/Tony
GioAguilar
2 Intern
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1882 Posts
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Posted January 2nd, 2008 13:00