[Troy]

That's exactly what I was getting at to confirm if the CD drive is indeed faulty or not.

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hi. i cannot boot my laptop and when diagnose, IDE device failed. blank media or no media is present in the optical drive.what is that mean? is it serious?

[baby82]

hi. i cannot boot my laptop and when diagnose, IDE device failed. blank media or no media is present in the optical drive.what is that mean? is it serious?

[makai]

baby82 You posted into two threads belonging to other people. If you need help, which seems obvious, you need to start your own thread.

[NOTEVER]

Managed to get he USB ready for the XP install. After much excitement all I get is the options GUI and Text Mode then once Text is chosen the horrible BSOD appears. How disappointing thought I was making progress. Thanks again to all especially Makai for the help

[makai]

Sheesh! Sorry you're having so much trouble. I can imagine your disappointment!

Are there any errors posted with the BSOD?

If you go through all the bios screens, can you see anything that might appear unusual? Is the hard drive, cdrom, ram detected and correctly identified? Is there any place you can check voltages in bios?

Try taking out 1 ram module at a time (if you have more than one installed) and try installing XP again. Swap modules and slots if needed.

Also, see if you can boot up without the CDROM drive installed in the computer. Pull it out and try installing XP. Perhaps something is wrong with it and causing some anomaly with the motherboard.

Since it's a laptop, there's not much you can pull out unless you're willing to disassemble. However, I would start pulling the wireless card, modem, etc, to see if something is affecting the XP installation. Basically, it comes down to isolation, as we're beginning to run out of options here.

[NOTEVER]

Tried the USB again this morning but all I'm getting now is

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright © 1997,1998,199 Intel Corp
VIA Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter v2.41 (2005/02/16)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel PXE ROM
Operating System not found

I'll try your other suggestions and see what happens
Cheers

[makai]

I'm going to have to build a USB XP flashdrive as I have no experience with it. Which site did you use to build yours? I'll try it, but I have a laptop I have to repair today, (something like 200+ malware hits so far), so I may not be able to have the results until tomorrow.

[NOTEVER]

Makai

This is the site I used

http://www.lockergno...sb-flash-drive/

[makai]

Ok, give me sometime to try this. I do need to complete the laptop repair, so it may not be till tomorrow until I attempt this.

[NOTEVER]

No prob. Thanks

[NOTEVER]

Just tried the USB gain after reseating the RAM module and the message I get after choosing the Text mode is
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file

Shall I redo the USB procedure?

[makai]

When you formatted your disk, how did you do it? The HAL error during setup points to a possible "Dynamic Disc Overlay" formatted drive... something you really don't need/want to have. What kind of HDD is it... manufacture/model number? If you have the HDD manufactures formatting utility, reformat it and remove the Dynamic Overlay.

[NOTEVER]

I have formatted the disk a number of times mainly when connected via my IDE - USB cable attached to my desktop pc. However I think during the USB procedure I recently did, at that link I gave you, it formats it again.
HDD is a Western Digital IDE WD600VE WD Scorpio

[NOTEVER]

Started afresh loading the USB XP flash . Everything went well loading the USB but installing it onto the laptop and choosing the Text option gave me the BSOD again. The error shows as
0x0000007B
(0xF79A263C, 0xC0000034,
0x00000000, 0x00000000)
Does that mean anything?
Tried choosing the GUI option and it gave me the hal.dll error.

[happyrock]

go here for Advanced troubleshooting for "Stop 0x0000007B" errors in Windows XP...
I think you should run chkdsk /r and memtest...you can run chkdsk /r from the recovery console