Question : Problem: compaq presario S3010CL full recovery fails winxp home

Hello, I am working on a compaq presario desktop S3010CL with Win xp home edition. The original hard drive failed and thus a new drive was purchased. The old drive size is 40 GB. The new drive size is 120 GB. Both drives are made by Seagate.
I had to purchase a 6 cd set (compaq system recovery) from HP. The new drive is seen in the bios. I set the boot settings to boot from cd. I insert the first compaq system recovery cd and boot the computer. I get a message that states the drive or partition is corrupt and to press R for a full system recovery. I press the R key and the hard drive gets the partition setup and reboots. AFter reboot the messages states that the system recovery is starting. I get a fast moving progress bar that goes from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. After the progress bar is finished, the text message disappears and all I get is a white bar on the bottom part of the screen. There is no activity at all. At this point, my only option is to power down the machine. I have called tech support and they had me try steps from the manufacturer's menu with the same results after the partition is created on the new drive. I have also tried running win xp install and get a frozen state after all the drivers are copied from the cd to memory. Just to test the hardware, I was able to install win 98 SE with no errors. I have since removed Win 98SE.

Any ideas?
thanks
sprovost

Answer : Problem: compaq presario S3010CL full recovery fails winxp home

I would suggest trying some different RAM in the machine if you can get some.  I've heard a lot of times where 98 will install, but XP won't.  I think XP uses the memory differently / more efficiantly and therefore if you have bad ram, XP will find it for you.