Ok I need some immediate help from a wizard. I don't know if this helps but I'm setting up two sata harddrives. I was able to proceed thru f6 then S to install drivers. Then the windows installation came up and completed successfully. Then it was copying setup files to the windows folder. When it got to about 20% some of the files were showing not found. I could press esc to skip but after several of those the blue screen pops up. Now these setup files are they coming from the windows disk? And if so could it be possible this windows is a fake? I need help. I've been in so many discussion forums and I can't seem to find anyone that knows. Thanks

I've done hundreds of XP installations and in most cases when you get errors copying the files in setup it's a RAM problem. Windows seems to wait until the RAM gets full before writing the files to the hard drive and so this is where memory problems show up. A dirty or damaged CD can also cause this, but usually XP will tell you if that's the problem it's having. I'm curious, is "modem.sys and ky.sys" two of the files it had problems copying? Musky If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

I had several months ago a similar problem, it turned out to be bad memory. Cheers de Peter

Agree. ram problem. If you have more than one stick, remove one for the instal process. You can also test each stick with memtest86. google for it. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

but how is ram part of this process?

During the instal process, files are read from the cd into ram and are then copied from ram onto the harddrive. If the ram is faulty or incompatible the copied files will contain errors and instal will fail. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

I have tried to reinstall windows xp pro due to the system32/config missing problem. Now I get the same error that is above. And yes Modem.sys is the first one that stops. I tried different ram, tested the ram, different hard drive, different cd rom, removed all cards, still exact same. I tried linux, and it works fine, 98 also works fine. I have a shuttle an25n-ultra 400 mobo with 512 mb ram a thornton core athlon xp 2000+ and an ati all in wonder 9600. I am stuck because I got this system to use program that only works with xp. By the way I have had xp functioning on two seperate installs from the same disk on this tower for more than six months, both reinstalls were due to the system32/config file missing thing. It appears that you have more info on the modem.sys thing than any one else so please help me. thank you.