Troubleshooting Windows XP Professional Setup

Windows XP Professional includes Recovery Console, which you can use to resolve problems that might occur during setup. This section also includes a discussion about common setup problems.

Recovery Console

Recovery Console is a command-line tool that you can start from Setup. Using Recovery Console, you can start and stop services, format drives, read and write data on a local drive (including drives formatted to use NTFS), and perform many other administrative tasks. The Recovery Console is particularly useful if you need to repair your computer by copying a system file from a floppy disk or CD ROM to your hard drive, or if you need to reconfigure a service that is preventing your computer from starting properly. Because Recovery Console is quite powerful, only advanced users who have a thorough knowledge of Windows XP Professional should use it. In addition, you must log on using the local Administrator account to use Recovery Console.

Recovery Console allows the local system administrator to access an NTFS volume without starting Windows XP Professional. When you are running Recovery Console, type help at the command prompt to get help for the available commands. For more information about installing and using Recovery Console, and other Startup issues, see Troubleshooting Startup and Tools for Troubleshooting in this book.

Common Setup Errors

The following troubleshooting tips can help you resolve problems that might occur during setup.

Disk space errors

If you receive the error message Not enough disk space for installation, use the Setup program to create a partition by using the existing free space on the hard disk. If you do not have enough space, you might have to delete files on the original partition to make space for the installation. You can delete and create partitions as needed to obtain a partition that has enough disk space to install Windows XP Professional.

If Windows XP Professional does not start, verify that all the installed hardware is detected. Check that all hardware is listed on the Hardware Compatibility List link on the Web Resources page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/reskits/webresources Only devices that are listed on the HCL have passed testing for compatibility with Windows XP Professional.

Stop messages

If you are installing Windows XP Professional and you encounter a Stop message, see the troubleshooting information for the Stop message in Common Stop Messages for Troubleshooting in this book. Also, check the HCL to determine whether the computer and its components are supported by Windows XP Professional. Reduce the number of hardware components by removing nonessential devices.

Setup stops during text mode

If possible, avoid legacy boot devices on ACPI systems because these settings cannot be reliably determined by the ACPI system. This can make the building of the device tree inaccurate, causing problems that are hard to track. For non-ACPI systems, verify that the Plug and Play operating system option is disabled in the BIOS. If it is not disabled, your operating system might read and write to the hardware registers.

Setup stops during GUI mode

If the computer stops responding during the GUI-mode phase of Setup, restart the computer and Setup will attempt to resume from where it stopped responding. You can usually isolate these failures to one of the following locations:

• Device detection. At the beginning of the GUI-mode phase of Setup, Plug and Play detects all the devices on the system. This involves external code called class installers. These class installers check the hardware settings on the computer to determine which devices are present.

• OC Manager. The Optional Component Manager (OCM or OC Manager) is a Setup component that allows the integration of external components into the setup process, such as Internet Information Service (IIS) and COM+, which have their own setup routines.

• Computer configuration. This is one of the last phases of Setup and involves the registration of object linking and embedding (OLE) control dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).

Disk input/output and file copy errors

If you receive disk input/output (I/O) errors or file copy errors during setup, your hard disk might be defective or contain defective sectors. For more information about troubleshooting and repairing your hard disk and defective sectors, see Troubleshooting Disks and File Systems and Disk Management in this book.

File copy errors

If you receive file copy errors during setup, you might need to replace RAM, or you might have defective media. For more information about troubleshooting RAM and bad media, see Common Stop Messages for Troubleshooting in this book.

More troubleshooting tips

For more information about troubleshooting Windows XP Professional, see Troubleshooting Concepts and Strategies, Tools for Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Disks and File Systems, and Troubleshooting Startup in this book.