"philo" wrote in message
...

"GJ" wrote in message
. ..
I seriously need help as I'm completely clueless as to what's the
problem...

Problem: My friend wanted me to look at his computer as it looked like
it
had gone, which it was. Got new hard drive (Maxtor 40GB Fireball 3
5400RPM)
and tried to install it. Turns out that the motherboard seemed to have
gone
as well. Suggested he get a basic system without hard drive and I would
fit
hard drive and his CD writer and DVD rom to the new system. Got case,
motherboard (ECS / ASROCK M810LMR) chip (Duron 1600 mhz) all assembled
and
I
put in hard drive, CD and DVD drives. Pretty straightforward so far...

Set computer to boot from CD, Stuck in the XP CD, get to the "press a
key
to
boot from cd" and try to format the harddrive to NTFS. The formatting
gets
to 100% then a new page comes up with the message "Setup was unable to
format the partition. The disk may be damaged". Odd I thought as it
was
a
brand new hard drive. Tried again but this time doing a quick NTFS
format.
Seemed to get through that OK, then it started to copy files from CD,
then
got a message "could not find xxx file" (or something). Tried this a
few
times and the file which it stopped at seemed to be random. Maybe it
was
the CD, I thought...


snip

may be a RAM problem


Hmm, I think you may have just hit the nail on the head. PC has 1 stick of
128 mb ram installed. I had been using quick boot and skipping the memory
check stage. Just enabled it before and it came up with "98304KB OK", which
equals 96 mb. So it looks like 32 mb ain't working. Unplugged the ram and
plugged it back in again and still only 96 mb...

Thanks for your help.

G.J.