The Saga Continues

A further update...

Now Deb’s machine has given some indication of the problem being the CD-ROM drive, which I had suspected earlier as a possibility.  Most of the way through setting up XP, it errors and refers to:

driver_corrupted_mmpool

That seems to be a mystery error that can mean many things, depending on the circumstances, of which during setup is a less explicable one.  It can be on account of a virus.  I think we can rule that out, considering the scorched earth procedure.  It can be a corrupt driver, except the circumstances seem to rule that out.  It can be settings that have never been changed in the BIOS.

At least one person out there found it was a bad CD or DVD drive causing it during install.

There was mild reason to wonder about this drive long before the problem in question.

I recently installed a giant cooling fan that required two of the 5 1/4” bays, so the CD stayed and the CDRW got evicted.  The CDRW is therefore available as a spare.  I’ll swap them and try letting it continue setup, or start fresh with setup, from that…

Update:

That was decisive.  It started setup where it left off and promptly died again.  It’s not the CD drive (DVD, actually).  Next up, check BIOS settings again, maybe replace the RAM even though it tested as good, and try a different hard drive to verify that it really isn’t the drive, which has tested fine repeatedly.  Maybe the video card even before that.  Before I start thinking it’s the CPU or motherboard, I want to be sure…

Posted by on 05/16 at 07:59 AM

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