Hi Steve from New Jersey...
Before you swap HDD's around, let's look at a couple things.
First, a hang at 39 minutes is usually caused by hardware. Do you have any external hardware connected to the machine during the installation? Printers and flash drives are particularly good at causing this hang. I have seen USB keyboards and mice cause this as well...you might try the install using PS2 input devices.
If the install still fails, you might see if it will complete a parallel install. This would allow you to recover any data you have on the old installation. If it runs well, you can move into the new install and remove the old one.
Parallel Installation of Windows XPBoot to the Windows XP installation cd by pressing a key when the "Press any key to boot from cd" prompt appears at the top of the screen.
- At the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press Enter to set up Windows XP.
- Accept the License Agreement by pressing F8
- With your current installation selected in the box, press Esc
- Select C: Partition1 [NTFS] in the box and press Enter
- To continue setup using this partition, press C
- Now you should see formatting options...choose the last one, Leave the current file system intact (no changes), and press Enter
- To use a different folder, press Esc
- Name the folder WINDOWS0 (just type a 0 (zero)) and press Enter
The Windows installation should begin. This will install Windows to a new folder, leaving your data intact. Any programs installed on the old directory will have to be reinstalled to the new one. Device drivers will also have to be installed for all the hardware to work as it should.
The data will be located in the Documents and Settings folder (C:\Documents and Settings) under your old user account name...so when you set up the new installation, give yourself a slightly different user account name.
Let me know how it goes...
wannabe1