Windows setup is hanging

[loveday]

Hello all,
I have come here with a great deal of hope and expectations.

I tried to upgrade a friend's windows 98 to win 2k.

Recently, the pc started having problems booting up or shutting down.

At first, I installed spybot anti spyware which seemed to have improved performce a bit.

But then, it all went downhill.

First, it started taking more than 20 minutes to boot up.

Then when you log in to the internet, speed is pretty fast but I was unable to open up any internet browser.

I just kept getting "page not found" error.

I tried scandisk and defrag, after letting it run for a whole day with no progress, I decided to upgrade to win 2k.

At first, it seemed to be ok, but then I read somewhere where it said that ntfs file system is faster and more secure than fat32 system.

I decided to convert from fat32 to ntfs but after converting, nothing worked anymore.

First, all install went well but then the pc got stuck on "registering windows components"

I left it to run a whole night but it just got stuck at about 1/3 of the hour glass.

What should I do?

I really am frustrated and depressed right now.

As a last resort, I wanted to format the hard drive and start all over.

So I got 98 boot disk because the pc should still have a 98 boot sector but it could not find drive c.

Can someone, please, please help.
What should I do?

 

[bcastner]

Everything in your note suggests a critical hardware failure in the hard disk drive.

And upgrading to Win2k from Win9x is not a good repair idea. You upgrade when everything is problem free.

Download from the hard drive manufacturers website their free setup/diangostic utility. This will generate a floppy disk image that you can use to boot the problem machine.

I suspect you need a new hard disk drive, but run the diagnostic utilities to see if it can be repaired/recovered.

 

[loveday]

ok,
I have successfully formatted drive c:

RIght now, can someone please tell me how to install windows 2000 from c:\ prompt?

After formatting the hard drive, the pc is booting to c:\ prompt.

I changed the boot sequence to boot from cd-rom but it is not booting from cd-rom.

 

[loveday]

all is well.
Thanks for your *great* help