Installing XP

[Bob The Mercenary]

Sometimes at Geek Squad we'll run into these problems that make absolutely no sense. Currently we are repairing a guy's desktop PC and trying to reinstall Windows XP on it. After using the recovery partition and going partially through the install process the screen goes completely blue, not a BSOD, just the background of the install menu with nothing else. It freezes there until a hard restart.

Then we tried an OEM disc we had lying around with the same result. We ran a hardware diag on the unit just to make sure the board, memory, and hard drive weren't on their last leg and everything passed. Finally, on a whim, we tried installing Windows 7 on it and it worked perfectly. Anyone have any ideas why a computer would get stuck installing XP from an assortment of media, but be fine with 7?

[Inbred Chocobo]

First thought is hardware compatibility. I know XP doesn't like some of the newest stuff, what are we dealing with here? Also, did this machine originally have XP, or did it have windows 7 and you are downgrading it?

Also, you may also need to format the harddrive as well, if you are just reinstalling XP over the top of the current one, as a random thought, it could be the current version of XP, or the remains of it, are tripping up the install of XP in what you are doing now.

I know installing windows 7 on a machine with XP really just renames the current windows folder to old and puts in a new one, since that has been done have you tried to go back and put XP back on it?

[Gregness]

Also, is this the 64 bit version of XP you're trying to put on a 32 bit processor?

I'm not even sure if it would let you try it, but if there's no hardware checks that might also be something...

[natowarhead]

Does the motherboard use AHCI? If so it needs to be disabled before installing XP and them re-enabled after installation is complete. XP doesn't play nice with AHCI during installs, but is fine afterwards for some reason.

If it doesn't use it, then I don't know what's up.