Hi all, I picked up a barebone kit at Tiger it included:

ECS GF6100-M754 Motherboard

AMD Sempron 3300+ Processor

Corsair 1024MB PC3200 DDR

and I bought a seagate 500 gig HD. hen I got it all built I installed my Windows XP cd to install it and around 58% of installing it on the blue screen part, it says that a certain file could not be installed and to check to see if my windows xp cd is in the drive (which it was) and gave me the option to either skip itor restart the installation or exit. If I skip the file it said windows would most likely not install correctly. I've never had this problem before, does anyone know how to get around that or do you think make it might be a hardware problem?

Hi all, I picked up a barebone kit at Tiger it included:

ECS GF6100-M754 Motherboard

AMD Sempron 3300+ Processor

Corsair 1024MB PC3200 DDR

and I bought a seagate 500 gig HD. hen I got it all built I installed my Windows XP cd to install it and around 58% of installing it on the blue screen part, it says that a certain file could not be installed and to check to see if my windows xp cd is in the drive (which it was) and gave me the option to either skip itor restart the installation or exit. If I skip the file it said windows would most likely not install correctly. I've never had this problem before, does anyone know how to get around that or do you think make it might be a hardware problem?

Most of the time I've run into that problem the actual fault was with the disk...the CD was dirty/scratched or in some other way damaged.

I tried it also with XP home which is on a different CD and I still get the sme problem

What is the file it can't find and is it the same on both disks?

I wish I wrote it down, but yes its the same file that cant be copied over.

Try it again, and make sure you get the file that's not being found...that way we can figure out if it really is critical, is a driver that isn't normally included and can be added later or something like that...

Also, what service pack level are the disks?

It's possible that you may need a disk that is at Service Pack 2 or newer...

This happens now and again, as mjc says, typically with dirty/scratched media but also can be caused or magnified as a problem when using an old or dirty optical drive. With XP it is much more likely that it will be critical for all files to get successfully copied across.

I nearly always have a few XP disks lying around (it should always be the same version) and I can nearly always get around this problem by ejecting the original CD and inserting another one and saying retry. This may need to be done a number of times.

Try and get or borrow a good pressed/retail copy of the CD from somewhere or even try cloning the CD onto CDR/RW medium. The resultant cloned CD may well be OK even when setup cannot complete on the original or it may still be OK when swapped in and out as mentioned earlier. If it is just one file then perhaps it could be copied onto another CD and swapped at that point but the likelihood is that there will be more than one dodgy file. Each CD also has a table of contents which setup reads from and so just having the lone file may not work.

An alternative method is to install directly from the HDD (http://paulski.netfirms.com/zpages.php?id=1711).

here is the file it cannot copy and I tried another XP cd and also same problem

KS.SYS

Odd...most of the stuff I've found seems to relate to ks.sys and Intel chips.

Are the disks you are using retail, pressed disks or are the slipstreamed or otherwise copies/burnt disks?

We still need to know what service pack level the disks you've tried are...

Even though its a new HDD it could also be worth checking it with the Seagate Utilitities and then zeroing it before re-trying a reinstall. SP2 is of particular relevance when using partitions greater than 127gig so also maybe try installing to a smallish say 20gig partition.

Guess what guys, it was the RAM. I had 2 sticks in there with 2 different speeds and apparently the MOBO didnt like that so I removed one and stuck with the 512 DDR. It installed fine thanks for your help but now I have a problem with computer #2 and I will post that in a different thread!! THanks again!

Thanks for letting us know. RAM is easily forgotten as a cause of file i/o problems and because it can cause so many diverse problems on PCs it should never be "out of the mix".