Alright, Im trying to fix a laptop for my friend. So i moved all of his data that he wanted to keep over to my external drive, and proceeded to attempt to reinstall XP. Problem is, everytime im going through the setup to install, i get to the place where it searches for instances of XP already installed, and the whole computer shuts down. Now it isnt always at that point, but more times than not its shut down there. Sometimes its right after all the hardware is searched, but never past finding other XP instances.

This thing is really starting to annoy me and i cant figure out why its choosing to shut down right then...

Model: Emachines M2352 Laptop
Current OS: Windows XP SP1

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Use a Linux CD to delete the partition, since you have all the data saved - of course, this will kill all the apps and such, and thus they will need to be re-installed....

good idea, i will try that tomorrow and see what happens...

If it fails as well, then that will indicate that there is most likely a drive error of some type - bad sectors or worse - although if you were able to access all the data, I am doubting that scenario (for now).

Good luck, and keep us posted.

Yeah thats exactly what i was thinking. Also i ran a memtest last night and it passed. The problem with this computer is that i can get into windows fine, but none of the windows elements open or run at all. cmd, my documents, any folder, windows media player, they all dont open or run. I wonder if that has anything to do with this issue...

Well i deleted the main partition, and its still crashing during setup...this time i selected the unpartitioned space and then it crashed...

Did you run diagnostics?

From Linux?

Well i succesfully installed Fedora Core 5. I have no clue why windows xp doesnt want to install for me...its really annoying because this guy really would rather have xp back on this laptop.

Im starting to think its a problem with the hard drive because now when i try to reinstall fedora over itself, it crashes during install...just like xp...

anyone have any other ideas??

Well i just ran a hard drive diagnostic which came back fine...no problems...now i have no clue what to think...

I have an idea.

I have an older system that is built for OC'ing - and even with Vista, a P3 3.2 GHz HT and 3 GB of PC3200 RAM, I let the Dynamic Overclocking thing OC my system - up until sometime in October- after a reinstall of Vista, all of a sudden my system would hang and freeze (not during the install, mind you, but after).

I turned off all the OCing, then reset the BIOS to default values, then tried Optimized values, then tried removing USB devices, then tried many different things, the last of which were Memtest and HD diagnostics.

I finally figured out what was causing the problem, on accident - my HD was simply overheating. I have a nice, powerful 2A 92 MM fan (actually stolen off a dead Dell machine that used that fan, attached to the back of the case, as the primary CPU cooler, with a funky green shroud to draw air straight off the CPU heatsink) installed in the front of my case. I took that funky green shroud and simply placed it in the bottom of my case - right tin front of that fan. Now, roughly 2/3 of the air flow gets shunted up and passes directly over (under) my HD. The result? No more freezing.

I know this is the case because last night I installed my new Tuniq 120 tower CPU cooler, and enabled the OC'ing again - system froze - I removed OC - still froze - then I realized I had left the shroud out - put it back in turned on OCing - and system now has an uptime of 13:51 (13 hours and 51 minutes).

even if the HD is not *hot* to touch, just moderately warm, try aiming airflow directly on it and see if it helps the situation - if so, rig a permanent airflow for the drive, but do advise the owner that he needs to invest in a new HD soon.

BTW, this HD I have cooling- it is 3 years old, and never had a problem before until this past October. It is a Seagate Barracuda 120 GB HD with 8 MB Cache.

well now i have another more serious problem. My girlfriend was looking at it and she pressed a button which brought up a screen that said it was deleting the flash memory. Now the computer wont turn on, nor does it even realize that there is power going to it. I took it apart to remove and replace the CMOS battery hoping that would do something. We will see if that helps...

deleting flash memory - oops - that was F11, right?

If you can get it to boot at all, then you'll need to use another computer to find the latest stable BIOS update for your computer (motherboard). That may be tricky, but first let us know if it boots at all. Otherwise, we'll have to take the detour and get it up again....first.

Yeah im not getting it to boot. It also doesnt realize that theres power going to it. Ugh...

So about this detour?

I have my laptop that i can download bios updates, but i have no idea how to go about installing or even finding and retrieving such data. I may need a walkthrough on this one.

Thanks again