This is exactly the sort of thing that I've been talking about... I have nothing against MS personally, but trying to get MS products to work can be such a headache. I don't claim to be a MS expert (but I work with a number of them), and we're all baffled by a system that I use at work... It's a Win2K Professional system, fully patched with the latest drivers... And it locks up for no apparant reason. It only locks up with Win2K... I had to run extensive diagnostics for 5 days, and it never locked up. Now, it locks up at least 4 times a day. the only software that's loaded on the system is MS software... Office 2000 (SR1). And when I try to update that, I get an error... No explanation, just an error. This is the third time I've loaded this system from scratch, going so far as to use different installation media. It's NOT the hardware. As I said, the hardware passed the diags, and more importantly, I've run both Linux and NetWare on the system with no problems. I work for a MCSP, and we can't get any help from Microsoft... They insist that it's a hardware problem. Funny, I work for a company that's a $700 million dollar a year VAR, and MS doesn't feel that it's important.
Mark
That partition is the larger of two partitions, one big (around 32GB), one small (around 8GB) on the Master IDE hard drive. Then we also have two same-sized partitions on a second hard drive. All are formated FAT32.
We visit the hardware maker's website and download ALL the updates --- we do not use the hardware updates from Microsoft.
To Install W2K Pro, we do roughly the following:
(1) After the OS appears to have successfully installed from the CD, we restart four times.
(2) After the fourth restart, we set the energy savings; we do not use standby or hibernate --- the machine will either be ON or OFF and nothing else. Here, we also check the virtual memory page settings --- often we find that the installation of additional RAM has not properly been taken into account by the OS, so we adjust the setting(s) --- we'll usually put the "swap file" on one of the second hard drive's partitions.
(3) We then get the latest ROM upgrade and install it, followed by any related hardware updates from the maker.
(4) We install Norton SystemWorks, chiefly for Norton Utilities and Norton Anti-Virus.
(5) The Microsoft Windows Updates follow.
(6) Then we complete the installation of the maker's updates.
(7) For steps 5, 6, and later, after each software application's installation, followed by two restarts, we run Norton Utilities WinDoctor and then another restart.
(8) Every step of the way, we try to keep it as clean an installation as possible.
I have seen hardware tests completely miss bad hard drive or keyboard or mouse connections, but usually, these kinds of marginal connections are indicated during startup --- failure to repeat "the same old startup."
In your place, I would install another CD player and read the install discs from it.