XP will not load

[John1397]

Machine was working yesterday today XP will not load after about 15 seconds freezes up, I am able to get in using safe mode and my hard drives (boot, system, active) are all correct. I tried using the XP setup disk to do both an upgrade and new install and both freeze up at the begining. I did a restore to a month earlier did not help still freezes up. I am only using 96 ram, but it has been running on this small amount of memory for years. Just wonder why it works in safe mode?

John

[mat123]

96 MB of ram that's small from Microsoft 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher

[John1397]

I had 190 ram the last time I installed XP then took it out after got everything working. Bigger problem my cd rw will not read xp disk on startup so will have to try the 6 floppy disks to see what happens as there most be hardware failure somewhere all though when I was still able to access XP I could read and write to the cd drive and I do have in the bios cd as first on the list.

John

[patio]

You have XP runnung on 96 Meg of RAM ? ?

[Allan]

Apparently not

[truenorth]

Just to further amaze you. I have XP home running on  a Compaq pressario 1810 laptop with only 64 MB of ram. Well running might be a leap would you believe crawling. Unfortunately it served my purpose for a while but now i will be casting about for something with more umph.truenorth

[John1397]

It was running good on 96 m ram. I got the six disks to start the XP from floppy drive that gets the computer to load from CD, but now have same problem everybody else has:

  The following value in the .SIF file used by setup is corrupted or missing:
  Value 0 on the line in section (Source Disks Files) with the key SP1.cab.
  Setup cannot continue. To quit setup press F3

First time it said I did not have enough hard drive space so I quick formated.
Wanted to get done in a hurry. I may need to do a complete format as someone posted:

  If you use boot diskettes or run the XP setup from Windows, then you can  
  trigger this failure. The boot diskettes trigger it since there are now TWO sets    
  of boot diskettes. One for the SP1 XP and one for the XP without. The .SIF file  
  IS DIFFERENT.

That is what I did is run setup from windows and I have a partioned hard drive with fat and ntfs and seems like when reinstalling xp it put a folder named $Win something in the fat drive and I deleted it, but now I think it was because of lack of space on ntfs drive.

John