Member Avatar for Thong_Ispector

A friend just brought me their pc. It has XP home and they wanted XP pro. They tried to do the upgrade and it bombed.

They bought a new copy of XP Pro...

It just hangs at the setup screen...

I put in a fresh drive with a single partition, NTFS..
Booted to the cd and it still hangs at the setup (blue screen)

Any ideas...

Oh, I put the XP Home drive back in and everything works just fine...

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Dani AI

Generated

Short summary and practical follow-up

Root cause in this thread: an internal memory‑card reader (the card slots built into the DVD burner) was still connected to the motherboard via an internal USB header and caused Windows XP setup to hang. confirmed the CD and hard drive worked in another PC, which is the classic sign the problem is hardware or device enumeration on that particular machine.

Why this happens (in plain terms)
During XP's text‑mode setup the installer probes storage devices and USB mass‑storage. Some internal USB readers or low‑level packet‑writing / CD‑burning filter drivers can block or confuse that enumeration and make setup stall. That explains why disabling antivirus or swapping RAM (good ideas from and ) may not help when the fault is an attached USB device inside the case.

Actionable checklist to avoid the hang

  1. Power off and unplug the PC. Physically disconnect internal USB headers that feed front‑panel or optical‑drive card readers.
  2. Remove all nonessential hardware: leave only CPU, one RAM module, the boot HDD, and one optical drive.
  3. Unplug every external USB device (sticks, cameras, phones, hubs).
  4. If you cannot unplug the reader, enter BIOS and temporarily disable the USB controller or "USB mass storage" option (note: USB keyboard may stop working; have a PS/2 keyboard ready).
  5. Reboot and run setup. If it still hangs, move the optical drive and/or HDD to another machine to confirm media/drive health (as @Thong_Ispector did).
  6. If an existing OS on that HDD has packet‑writing or Roxio‑type software, uninstall it before attempting an in‑place upgrade; otherwise perform a clean install on a clean drive.
  7. If all else fails, check for a motherboard BIOS update and try IDE/compatibility mode for the optical drive.

Credit to for isolating the culprit; the above turns that troubleshooting into a repeatable checklist for similar hangs during Windows setup.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for MartyMcFly

For the upgrade did you ensure all AntiVirus, Firewall and stuff like that was disabled, perhaps it may be a good idea to upgrade in safe mode, although I've never tried that myself, and can't confirm it would work.

As for the new install, have you installed any third party scsi drivers in Windows setup as applicable. May need to install at the start of the Windows installation.

Try using the XP Home disk on the new drive as a process of elimination. Have you done the Master / Slave thing on XP, I can't remember if its required, someone help me out there.

Member Avatar for dlh6213

Here are some links that may help:

Member Avatar for Thong_Ispector

I considered the antivirus problem and so did the user. It appeared that everything was disabled. I still had the same problem...

To insure that nothing was running I took a spare drive, formatted it as NTFS, removed the other drive from the system and tried to install using only the clean drive and the problem still exists...

I did have one thought, could the CMOS antivirus boot sector protection be on and be causing this problem...

Member Avatar for Thong_Ispector

Update:
I tried several things with the same result.
I finally took the fresh hard drive out and put it into another machine and using the same cd and the same hard drive the install went as it should.

So the problem is with the hardware in that machine.

SO what could the problem be...

I checked the bios for boot sector protection and found none.

There are no other hard drives in the system.

No floppy drive

One CD burner one dvd burner

The dvd burner was new so I even tried the install without it in the system.

I tried the install from both drives.

I replaced the ram with some known good ram chips.

Video is onboard... Actually everythng is onboard...

I tried it with and without the maxtor hard drive setup disk...

Member Avatar for Catweazle

You mentioned RAM chips. Try it with just a single module installed. RAM mismatches can do this ;)

Member Avatar for MichaelV

can you try to format the clean drive into FAT32 file system? Then install windows98SE(remember to create a bootup disk first) and do a WinXP Pro clean install on it? It usually works for me no matter it's on a PC or laptop. I prefer installing windows98SE first because it is always faster to install/upgrade Windows XP in windows mode compared to running the cdrom:i386\Winnt.exe setup from DOS.

Resources
=========
to convert your filesystem to NTFS, read it here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q307881&ID=KB%3BEN-US%3BQ307881#2

to get a bootdisk (windows98SE version)
www.bootdisk.com

Member Avatar for Thong_Ispector

Problem was finally solved...

The DVD recorder was one that had slots for memory sticks.
Even though I disconnected the ribbon cable in trying to figure out the problem I did not disconnect the USB wiring for those memory card slots...

I also found a link on the Microsoft Site where Roxio products can cause the same problems...

Hope this helps someone else...

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