I've tried booting with xp boot cd. I still am stuck in half installed loop.

Swapped the CD device with one from another machine, and I get same
thing..."fatal error...manifest error at top of page", then no keypad
entries are accepted.

Reset machine.

During boot up it goes through the mem test and then more boots stuff...then
it tells me that the machine is running in
Safe Mode and to check the BIOS

When I check the BIOS the 1st boot is CDROM, 2nd is Hardrive, 3rd is
Removable...but I've also tried different
variations of this sequence with no different outcome.

During the boot up it finds the hardrive and the CDROM - but it seems to be
ignoring the CDROM..I think. We've also tried plugging the CD into the other
jack on the mb, and same for the SATA hd.

Bios also has setting for A: as a Floppy (which there isn't one) but I've
tried disabling or changing to none, with nothing notable happening.

The machine still will try to complete the unfinished installaton of XP. My
son thinks we should remove the hd and put in into my machine and delete
everything off of it and then put it back into the new machine and start
over again. His thinking is that that would wipe out the half finished
install and maybe get us somewhere? Does this make sense? or should we do
that and re-partition/format it instead?

I've lost. I've never had this happen before.

tnx..

rob



"Bruce Chambers" <bchambers@cable0ne.n3t> wrote in message
news:eWu88gKCGHA.1180@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
| Rob Giordano (Crash) wrote:
| > Howdy all...
| >
| > Attempting clean install of XP Pro on
| > New:
| > Abit mb
| > Sony CD/DVD burner
| > NO floppy
| > Maxtor HD
| > 1 gig ram
| >
| >
| > Up till the wee hours with problem.
| >
| > Partitioned hd fine, two partitions C & D.
| >
| > XP gets up to the point where it's actually starting to install itself,
then
| > we get error about not finding I386, somekind of manifest error (forgive
me
| > but don't remember the exact errors since we tried it so many times, and
Im
| > now kinda burned out on this).
| >
| > For a while it would ask to put the CD in or point to where I386 was, we
| > tried this abt 5 times, now it doesn't even ask for that. We are stuck
in
| > somekind of half-installed loop.
| >
| > I even tried using the full XP Pro CD from my machine, that didn't work.
We
| > don't ever get to where it asks for the key...so I thought this might
| > work..nope.
| >
| > This is an xmas present for my daughter so my son and I were messing
with
| > this for a long time. Probably tried 10 times to get this installed.
| >
| > Maybe its a bad CD or the burner is not reading it correctly?
| >
|
| Possible, but on the low-end of the likelihood scale.
|
|
| > Ok...so should we reformat...but how if we're in this loop and we don't
have
| > a Floppy A drive?
| > Should I buy an A floppy drive and try a boot disk?
|
|
| The presence or absence of a floppy drive is immaterial. In fact, boot
| diskettes are things of the past, as all legitimate WinXP CDs are
bootable.
|
|
| > I'm sure the store where I bought the parts will replace the XP Pro disk
if
| > I need to also.
| >
| > We've tried a bunch of other things too, which I won't bore you with.
| >
|
| Actually, if we know what you've already tried, we won't waste your
| time asking you to repeat troubleshooting steps.
|
| Problems copying files or corrupted files during installation are
| most often caused by defective or sub-standard hardware; in order of
| likelihood, either RAM, the hard drive, or the motherboard. On very
| rare occasions the installation CD is the problem.
|
|
| --
|
| Bruce Chambers
|
| Help us help you:
| http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
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|
| You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
| both at once. - RAH