Various blue screens during XP setup

Hey guys, I just signed up, I've got a lot of good stuff from these forums in the past, thought I'd join up at last!

I'm trying to reinstall XP on a mate's computer - formerly a horrible HP OEM mess that was clogged up with years of unwanted software, dodgy downloadds and such. Throughout the install program, I keep getting blue screens, of various different forms. IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is common, and PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA is quite frequent too, but I've seen about 6 different ones in total.

Sometimes a driver file is specified (ntfs.sys, acpi.sys, others...) and sometimes not.

I've run Memtest86, which everybody seems to recommend, and it said everything was fine with the memory. I've removed everything but the graphics and sound card, disabled on-board sound, disabled LPT and COM ports (in the BIOS), tried using a new hard disk, alternated the CD drives. All with no success. I really can't find anybody who can help me!!

 

Hm.. Weird. Normally I'd say check the clock speed, but now I'm not so sure.... memtest would fail if you're overclocking, or at least I think it would...

Do go into BIOS and check out the FSB, multiplier (not that you can change it but...), any other CPU related settings, and check them against the CPUs required settings. To me it sounds like the FSB is wrong.

 

But the machine worked with its own OEM setup, so surely hardware settings don't come into it? Other than the changes I mentioned I haven't changed anytyhing in the BIOS, and this computer has never been overclocked or anything like that. The BIOS is kind of limited anyway, all you can do is disable various features like the serial port, parallel port and onboard audio. Other than that its just boot sequence, IDE devices and system time!

What about a BIOS upgrade? Could that solve my problem? And where can I get one?

 

Have you tried FDISK, if not try FDISK/MBR and then refomatting and installing, I seem to remember coming across this before.

 

At first I thought that maybe it was a hard disk problem as I said, but I've changed the hard disk now! In the past I've been bailed out a couple of times by a 'debug' script that wipes all the allocation tables, but surely this sort of problem happening on two hard disks at once isn't very likely!

This machine's absolutely driving me insane...

 

That is bizzarre. Those two stops are most often linked with an unstable overclock. As a result of RAM failing.

BIOS update would come from the manufacturers website. You might need to check out the system model number, see if its on the case somewhere.

 

I'm glad somebody else agrees that this is not a normal way for a computer to behave!

Off to bed now, it being after midnight here, thanks for the help, I'll try the BIOS tomorrow.