Clean installation of XP Pro fails



A customer has asked me to reinstall XP Pro for him from a Genuine Advantage
CD. Previously the PC had an illegal key (maybe a volume licence key) so he
bought the Genuine Advantage CD to make himself legal. He was able to
install this OK, but several months later an unspecified problem required
him to reinstall - and that's when the problems began...

I've booted off the CD and selected the options to reformat the disk and do
a fresh installation. The setup completes the first phase, in text mode,
where it copies the installation files off the CD. However when it reboots
the PC (booting this time off the hard disk), the blue scrolling bar on the
initial Windows logo screen freezes after a few seconds - and it never gets
any further: there's no more disk activity.

I've successfully installed XP Home, which suggests that the hardware is OK.
I've also tried install XP Pro to a different disk, with the same failure,
which suggests it's not the customer's disk that's at fault.

Before the customer needed to reinstall, the PC was quite happily running XP
Pro.

Does anyone have any further suggestions.


.



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