Member Avatar for essco

I have a dell laptop that I had win 98 on, It's like 500 mhz with 128 mb of ram. I installed win xp pro but it ran very slowly (I know cause of the ram), Anyway I uninstalled it and formatted it then tried to load another os on it but now anytime I try to install a os, the laptop hangs up with just a blank screen after the message "setup is inspecting your hardware configuration". What causes this and how can I fix it. The laptop was working fine before so I dont think its hardware failure. I can hear the hard drive spinning. Any ideas????

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reported the installer stopping right after "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" on a 500 MHz Dell with 128 MB RAM. That line is the text-mode setup phase where Windows enumerates devices and loads basic drivers. A hang there is usually caused by problems the installer relies on before it ever touches partitions: unreadable installation media or a failing CD drive, bad RAM, or a BIOS/device-enumeration conflict — not (primarily) the on-disk file system.

Building on the notes from and , focus diagnostic effort in this order:

  1. Verify the installer media and drive — boot the same CD on another machine or use a freshly burned, verified disc.
  2. Boot a different rescue/Live medium (small Linux LiveCD or a bootable DOS image) to confirm whether the optical drive and hard disk can be seen and read.
  3. Run a dedicated memory test (Memtest86+ from bootable media) and test sticks one at a time; RAM errors commonly cause early setup freezes.
  4. Reset BIOS to defaults and disable nonessential/advanced options (extra onboard devices, APIC/ACPI/APM or similar toggles, Plug-and-Play behaviors) so the installer sees a minimal hardware set.
  5. Try a minimal hardware configuration (single RAM module, no PCMCIA/cards/USB devices).
  6. If the CD drive is suspect, attempt installation from a different drive (external USB CD) or from a known-good source.
  7. If diagnostics point to the hard drive, remove it and run the manufacturer’s diagnostic on another PC.

Note: with 128 MB RAM, modern XP will be very constrained — a lightweight OS (Win98SE or a small Linux distro) is a more realistic target for usable performance on that hardware.

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Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

Hi,
If you formatted the drive there is nothing of XP pro to do anything, it must be your new (old) OS that is causing the problem. Try chkdsk. to check your HD and maybe uninstall, reformat and re-install OS.

Member Avatar for sparkax

Just a thought.
Could be the NTFS file system is causing a problem.

Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

Unless you formatted it as NTFS you should not have any problems. Did you format in DOS, did you use FDISK, if not you could try that. What OS are you putting on now?

Member Avatar for essco

Unless you formatted it as NTFS you should not have any problems. Did you format in DOS, did you use FDISK, if not you could try that. What OS are you putting on now?

I think I did format it in ntfs. Anyway I,m trying to put xp home or even win98 on it, I know the hard drives empty but now that I'm trying to put a os on it, just can't get pass that message. I even tried to load xp pro back on it, but it just goes blank after that message. I can only access the bios and everything looks ok. I changed boot sequence to load from cd rom first. help!

Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

First up, XP of any kind is not going to work well on your PC. Use your win98 floppy start up disk to start the PC and then do "chkdsk" and "Fdisk" and then format and then try another win98 intall.

Member Avatar for essco

OK I'll try that and get back to you.

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