My friend has an HP Pavillion and recently the computer stopped booting to windows. When you turn it on it just shows a screen with a flashing command prompt-style cursor. I was able to get into the system set-up and re-arranged the boot order and therefore could boot a Windows XP SP1 installation disk. I was able to re-partition and format the drive without any problems, but once I started installing setup repeatedly reported various files that could not be installed. I kept ignoring these problems hoping that it would still be able to install, however once all files were copied it told me that setup could not continue because setup.inf could not be found.

I am beginning to believe that there must be physical hard drive damage because I cannot understand what else would prevent files from being copied to a newly formatted hard drive, however any other insight or additional suggestions on this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I think you could boot to the xp cd and run chkdsk to check harddrive .
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...us/chkdsk.mspx

I'll try chkdsk... I also downloaded a zero fill utility today, do you think that would be of any help?

If it is a newer HP that came with a restore disk, some times they dont take well if there is still the restore partition on the on the HD. Also one thing I would be concerned about if the HP is older would be proprietary hardware that don't have common driver. I worked on a older HP about 2 years ago that the driver support was non exsistant.

The computer is about 3 years old. I repartitioned the entire hard drive, but how would I know if there's a restore partition on there?

you might not find it. it's a hidden partition. Dell uses them all the time.
you best bet is to run a debug script on the Hard Drive. That will wipe out
everything, including hidden partitions

I've had to do that before with a Dell. Is it a standard script or varies by computer (I'll check HP's support section I guess...)

Another possibility... is your installation CD scratched or dirty?

Just to keep everyone updated... I ran a debug script on the computer with no luck. I tried to run a hard drive analyzer but that won't even work. I zero filled the drive and will see if that worked tonight. If it doesn't I'm just going to put a new hard drive in.

I have been having similar problems myself. Thus far I have tried a different hard drive, a different CD ROM and a different stick of RAM (PC100 instead of the preinstalled PC133). Unfortunately, none of these attempts has solved the problem. Thinking that the software disc might be the problem, I tried three different copies of XP Pro, one copy of XP Home, and one copy of Windows 2000 Pro. The only operating system that completed installation was Windows 98SE. However, this reads a registry error every time it boots.
Incidentally, I also checked to the CR2032 backup battery and it was good. In so doing I reset the system bios but this, too, did not improve the installation process. It should also be noted that the files that will not copy vary on each attempt, even if the installation CD is the same. I'll get back if I have any success.