I realise it's pretty blurry but can still be made out. Thanks!

Its as you might expect, usually a partition error. Although it claims to be a memory paging error.

I suspect it is caused because your machine had some kind of tiny partition at the front of the drive, usually caused by the manufacturer creating some sort of rescue area where memory can be dumped which they forget will be too complex for anybody to ever want to use.

Get a hold of a windows 98 floppy, or 95. Boot from that and use the FDISK utitlity to remove all the partitions completely, then reboot and let windows try to create a partition and then format it.

If that fails, create a full partition in fdisk, and low-level format it using the FORMAT app. Then try again.

If its not working, (and invariably a bit of trial and error with these utilities always does) let us see the screenshots of what it says is available to you hard disk space wise, and what you choose to create partition-wise.

Avoid quick formats while you are troubleshooting this/

J

This is usually caused by bad hardware, typically RAM or hard drive. I had this once and I tracked it down to a bad RAM slot on my MOBO. Any fault along the momory path can cause this, includign damage to the MOBO. If I were you, I'd get [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.memtest8…"]Memtest86[/]="http://www.memtest8…"]Memtest86[/] and check out my RAM. Just let it grind for a good while and see if you get any errors. If you don't, it's probably the hard drive.

Interesting idea, Jeemy. Certainly a brighter outlook than mine! Good luck, Gavin.

erm yeh its been that about 50% of the time on installs i've done for people. however i never thought of why gav is reinstalling in the first place....if your crashes were due to hardware faults, then reinstalling would be an obvious recourse. try both.

i think its trying to dump to or from a very tiny partition and that causes a memory fail, hence the claim that it is paging memory (write-out from HDD)

Might seem like a bit of a simple suggestion but give it a shot. Open up the case and make sure all of your hardware, ram included, is seated properly. You might even want to pull out each pci card, ram sim and just re-seat it, making sure it is fully inserted into it's slot. Sometimes, especially with some of the cheaper cases where the pci slots don't align properly with the case holes, the cards work their way loose. Re-seating them can make things all better.

Hey, thanks guys! I'll start this tomorrow working my way up from the least apocalyptic solution, hahaha!

I really appreciate your answers guys!

Another thing to try is remove all un necessary hardware from your machine and boot up. Only start up with video card and OS drive. If you still get that error you can reformat or if need be hit the R for repair and do a chkdsk /r operation when you get to the command prompt. You will of course need to enter 1 for the installation you want to repair then be prepared to go out for a bit while the check disk does its thang!

Opus

Last time I saw that screen was when my wife spilled water on her running laptop.