XP Installation Hangs

[Tesla]

I am repairing a PC for a customer.

The HDD was corrupt and I think this was caused by the customer rarely shutting down but instead powering off by holding the button for 5secs.

Anyway, I have managed to salvage the user's data from the HDD and am not going about reinstalling Windows.

The XP install is hanging at the initial user-input screen. The screen where it reads press Enter to install windows, R for recovery console etc.

I checked out the IDE cables and one of them seems to have part of one of the cables missing! Very strange, the customer has never opened the PC so it must of been like this from new

I have also tried a second hard disk but have the same problem.

It may be worth noting that the PC would also cause my ultimnate boot CD to hang and I was unable to run any app's off of that.

The keyboard lights switch off when the PC hangs too.

I am running out of ideas here, I think I will go and play with the ACPI settings and see if that yields anything.

Any ideas chaps?

Cheers,

Chris

[jamin]

I had a system where a faulty usb memory card reader caused a very similar problems. It was an internal one that plugged into an internal usb header. Might be worth checking mate.

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

RAM is always a potential problem in these situations, especially if you can't run any apps from the UBCD.

Try some other RAM modules in the machine which you know to be working.

[Tesla]

Well, I left the pc alone whilst I worked on another one and also I have been busy dismantling my own keyboard so I can wash the crumbs out and lo and behold it seems to of sorted itself out.

I am running my own stick of ram in there though so will memtest the customers stuff to make sure that is not where the problem lies.

It must of taken a couple of minutes for it to start going again, I guess the PC was waiting for a response from some hardware and eventually timed out?

It doesn't have any USB devices attached, not even card readers. It is a packard bell machine though.

Off topic slightly, I have had two PC's in over the past week with suspect IDE cables. The one in this thread and a HP media centre base unit.

Both of them have had little nicks out of the IDE cable on one of the wires. Is this intentional, it doesn't look as if it was done by anybody, looks like a machine did it.

[this_is_gav]

The XP install is hanging at the initial user-input screen. The screen where it reads press Enter to install windows, R for recovery console etc.

Is it hanging on that screen, or the one before it ("Windows is starting" I think it is)? I know you said no USB devices are present, but just to clarify, that also means no USB keyboard, just a PS/2 one?

Regarding the missing hard drive cable, what do you mean? Surely if you could rescue data from it, both the cables (power and PATA/SATA) must have been connected? //edit: never mind, I see you mean in your last post that it was a bit of the cable missing, not one of the cables themselves.

[Tesla]

I'll upload a pic of the cables...