Windows XP installation errors, hardware failure?

Hi i have an old laptop, it is a compaq presario 2500. My dad had it as his first ever PC (or laptop) he has never used the internet until i gave him this about 1 month ago.

He said a screen popped up saying that he had a virus and he had to open a link to fix it. he naturally clicked yes (damn viruses).

The laptop was unrecoverable and he has lost all his work on it.

I have a few versions of XP mostly original but i have access to our companys corporate edition also.

When i try and install ( i have tried 4 copies) it always fails when copying files in the initial setup. i click escape to skip the file but this usually results in a unbootable laptop. i have reset bios defaults incase anything has been altered in there.

Any one have any suggestions? swapping Hard drives is out as i dont have any spare little ones.

Thanks

figured this one out, it had a dodgy stick of RAM, removed it and it worked first time, only has 256 mb now though eek!

Good to see another fix for that, it's happened to me once. In this case it was all .xml files that wouldn't copy in the initial setup.

Turned out I just had to delete all partitions and completely reformat, worked perfectly then.

Must be something to do with files that old setups leave behind?

Not so great if you're only trying a repair tho... :P