Greets all,

I am stumped on this one. The Acer Aspire 500 windowsXP took a dump. Nonsystem disk error. No problem... right... simple MBR, or partition failure, something easy right? Wrong.

After four days of working with Partition Magic 8, Super FDisk, and MS-DOS 7. I can get the HDD formatted NFTS, and all pretty to accept the windowsXP (I have also in my attempts used fat and fat32, and every combination of options with Fdisk, super Fdisk, and partition magic to make this damned thing accept the OS. Even using the WindowsXP recovery. Nadda, every time I do it tells me with the blue screen of death that it shut the computer down to protect it from software, hard ware, or some such other nonsense. Anyway.. Since I was at the end of my rope with windows... I had a friend burn a copy of linux. Presto bingo installed without a hitch. So... I figured I'd try again with windows.. formatted, partitioned, etc, Nadda. So I tried a new HDD, an old HDD ( I know works and has windowsXP on it) and still nadda, get the same error with blue screen of death. But again a different version of Fedora Red Hat 9 installs without fail.

Any ideas? I am pretty sure it is a hard ware failure/conflict but have no idea what especially since it all works in Linux. (have not been able to test the network card, etc, as I have no clue what the hell to even do with Linux let alone where to start).

Soooo, just out of morbid curiosity... anyone have an idea off the top of their head what it may be?

I might add that no new hardware had been installed. Same configuration for the last three years. The only new software installed was itunes and the auto windows updates. No one kicked it, dropped it, or physically damaged it.. yet...

A bad XP install disc?
Try another XP disc that matches they type of your XP key (home, pro, OEM, retail, etc)

I have two XP install disks tried both. Still no luck. I did however manage to get MS-DOS7 (Thanks to this site and the ISO install download) installed without a glitch.

Looks like I am going to have to learn Linux... uggg. Looks nice but kinda old to be learning a new system.

Are you running DOS from a cd or is it on the hdd? If you are having issues installing Windows, there should be a problem installing any OS. If you are capable of installing Linux or DOS, then there is definitly something wrong with the cds, cd drive or another piece of hardware, likely RAM or mobo. I have seen random errors start after a power surge that disrupts the motherboard, but does not completely wreck it.

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-William. § (marvin_gohan)

I've seen this happen with a bad power supply on desktops.
I would also go into the BIOS and select Default configuration.

You could also run some memory and board diagnostics.
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