A few weeks ago my Windows XP installation began showing the 'blue screen of death' during normal use, then restarting. That went on until it failed to start completely, even in safe mode. I thought that might be a memory issue, but during the memtest (which I left running for about half an hour) there were no problems.
So I tried reinstalling the OS (tried with the CD and USB stick) and everything went fine until the part where it asks to select the partition in which to install. Here it says "hard drive is corrupt" and set up can't continue. Well, it seems my HDD's screwed up. To make sure it was a problem with the HDD, I took it off of that machine and put it in my other PC. But there the installation occurred normally, without any problems.
Also, I have two hard drives in that machine (the one in which the system fails loading), tried installing the OS in both, but it doesn't matter: the problem still comes up. oth hard drives present in the problematic machine are IDE.
Maybe it's convenient to say that I also tried booting from a Linux live cd, but before half the process had gone through, the PC restarted.
So, I'm stuck with this problem, and don't want to spend money on a memory stick without making sure that's the problem. Any tips would be welcome.
Best Answer
Power supply - most likley the 12volt line .. causes disk drives to act funny whilst the rest of the system works just fine ..
Unplug the other drive (less load on 12 volt) & see if the OS loads 'OK' ..