[eva11maria]

Hi,

I'm brand new to this forum. Thank you for being here to share your knowledge and expertise!

My Dell Dimension 2400 has lately been crashing, restarting, and then failing to complete the boot process. A computer-knowledgeable friend suggested I do a clean install because it was no longer very functional. I backed up all my data, and popped in the Windows XP Home (SP3) CD. The install went fine, up to the point where it instructed me to re-boot the computer. When I did so, it started to re-boot, then gave a message saying 'set up is being restarted'. Right after that it gave an error message saying 'the operation requested was unsuccessful'. Then it just goes back to the Dell start up screen and tries to re-boot again (and fails).

Any suggestions on where to go from here would be greatly appreciated! My computer friend is unavailable, so I am hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

Cheers, Eva

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Try an install again , but see if the disk will reboot the computer on its own,that's what my XP Home CD does.

[Wepynx-old]

Try an install again , but see if the disk will reboot the computer on its own,that's what my XP Home CD does.

[Ztruker]

Is it a XP Home install CD or a Dell Recovery CD?

This could be caused by defective RAM or hard drive.

To check RAM: Download Memtest86+ (you want the 2nd one Download - Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip)). Unzip it then create a CD from the iso file using your CD burning software. There is a good freeware burner called ImgBurn which will do this easily.

DO NOT burn the .iso file directly to CD. It must be used as input to a program that knows what to do with it, like the one I mentioned above.

Boot the CD and run for at least 3 complete passes unless it shows errors sooner than that.

Check the hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools.
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.
Bootable Hard Drive Diagnostics

Note: These can be downloaded and burned to CD on any computr.