I just recently purchased win xp and tried to install on computer running win2000. After trying both the upgrade and new install options I kept getting the same result, it would freeze after the first restart, right after saying "starting windows". Soo, I tried reformatting my c: and starting fresh only to encounter the same problem, after booting from cd, it loads drivers, and says its starting windows and then it freezes. I have tried everything, changing bios settings, and computer types using the f5 option right when setup begins. I am fresh out of ideas, so I would be very appercitiave of any suggestions. Thanks

What is your CPU, Motherboard, Graphics card, etc?

I had a problem similar to that. It turned out that I had bad memory. Different Operating systems use memory differently; a memory problem that doesn't show in a previous version of Windows might show in XP. I'm not saying this is defiantly your problem, but I'd put in another memory stick and see if that works. At least run a diagnostic test on your memory.

I had the same problem. It may be that the computer is not really "hung up" and you could leave it at that screen for about two hours and you may be pleasantly surprised. What worked for me was that I used a Win98 boot disk to access a dos prompt and then logged on to the Win XP CD, entered the i386 directory and ran file winnt.exe (don't do a directory listing of this directory, there are over a thousand files in it!). Now what happens is that XP will start installing, slightly differently, and will appear to hang at the "copying files to hard disk" screen. I left my computer running for about an hour and then saw a progress bar indicating that files were indeed being copied. It took over two hours for this, then everything was fine. I have an athlon 1133 with 512 MB ram so I don't know why it still took so long. Good luck.

I had the same problem. It may be that the computer is not really "hung up" and you could leave it at that screen for about two hours and you may be pleasantly surprised. What worked for me was that I used a Win98 boot disk to access a dos prompt and then logged on to the Win XP CD, entered the i386 directory and ran file winnt.exe (don't do a directory listing of this directory, there are over a thousand files in it!). Now what happens is that XP will start installing, slightly differently, and will appear to hang at the "copying files to hard disk" screen. I left my computer running for about an hour and then saw a progress bar indicating that files were indeed being copied. It took over two hours for this, then everything was fine. I have an athlon 1133 with 512 MB ram so I don't know why it still took so long. Good luck.

The reason it takes sooooo long is because of a problem with not having Smartdrive installed. This DRAMATICALLY improves load and setup times. ADD SMARTDRV.exe from any windows boot disk, or from a win98se, ME, or 98 bootdisk, boot from the floppy, and when you get to an A: prompt type smartdrv, give it a couple of secs, then it will return to an a prompt. Navigate to cd-rom drive ( E: ), or whatever yours is and continue with winnt.exe from the i386 dir.......Setup wont take long then, although I am having the same damn issues with my s--- hanging at "starting windows"

Hi GmBeano, I was searching the www for an answer to my problem and found you had got there too... I have found that this problem happens to me on... 1. a clean install, e.g. FDISK & Format C: and install from hard disk D:\I386\WinNT.exe using XP boot disk from www.bootdisk.com, but PC hangs with black screen after DOS portion set up but on starting Windows set up for first time. 2. an upgrade from a minimal install of Windows 98SE then upgrade to XP from D:\I386\WinNT.exe, but again but PC hangs with black screen on starting Windows set up for first time. 3. and even on Windows 2000, where I tried a clean install from W2K CD-ROM. Failure. PC hangs during set-up, halfway through Installing devices, with error msg: " ***Hardware Malfunction Call your hardware vendor for support *** The system has halted *** ". But the weird thing is that I CAN do an upgrade to XP from my current version of Windows 98SE - it's just that I wanted to do a clean fresh install, rather than an upgrade of what by now is a bloated 98 SE. Microsoft website article q310/0/64 says known problem due to h/w or s/w. Suggestions I have seen for a cure are.. disconnect the CDROM, remove all unnecessary cards, turn off ACPI on the BIOS (then at F6 for RAID msg, press F7 to disable ACPI and enable APM), select 'non-Plug and Play OS' in BIOS, flash the latest version of the BIOS, connecting EDI hard disks via 40 connector cable rather than 80 wire, to avoid XP not having a compatible ATA-66 or ATA-100 driver . Failure on all of them. The only things I haven't yet tried are to replace the SDRAM and the AGP video card. Please let me know if you find an answer. Cheers, Marc