How To Fix Installation Problems?

Question

Right, my friends PC is having a lot of trouble recently and I'm at my wits end with it. He has a somewhat old PC, thats worked fine for some time with some upgrades applied to it. Just to warn you, this is a wall of text, since its easiest for me to tell you everything I've tried thus far.

The initial problem was that he kept getting constant crash to desktop errors with Dawn of War (video game). Since the best way to fix this was apparently to re-install the program, he uninstalled it and then tried to install again. However, he got 'cyclic redundancy check error' problems with various parts of the installation. I researched it and found that its often a problem with either a damaged/dirty disc or a non-functional optical drive.

I tested my disc in the system (which works fine on mine) and it had the same error, so its not the disc. Thinking that it could be the optical drive, I tested several other games which use both cd and dvd media and they installed and ran fine.

At this point, my friend had got sick of the whole affair, and asked me to start his PC from scratch. Reluctantly I agreed. After deleting the partition, remaking it and installing a fresh windows XP on there, I ran into trouble installing the sound drivers from a disc - only half of them installed automatically, the other half had to be done manually. The wireless drivers worked fine, and after connecting to the internet I downloaded the latest drivers for his Nvidia graphics card, in addition to some other basic programs (iTunes, Ccleaner, etc).

However, once again we ran into trouble with installing the graphics drivers - it said that the program could not be unpacked due to the file being corrupted, similiar to the initial error we had with Dawn of War. This was also the same problem I had with the other programs, specifically Ccleaner couldnt install.

The fact that the downloaded programs ran into the same error as the CD-installed programs mystifies me, as it eliminates the optical drive as the fault. Not only that, but this is on a fresh install of windows xp on a computer with no previous history of errors.

(TL: DR version - Ran into problem installing game (apparently corrupt, disc is fine), re-installed windows XP, ran into similar problems not only with driver disc but with drivers downloaded from the internet.)

At this point I'm starting to think its some other piece of hardware at fault - I have some spare hard drives we could try, but otherwise I'm at a complete loss.

Hardrive: 80GB Maxtor HDD

RAM: 2gb

Graphics Card: 7800GTX 256mb AGP

Processor: Intel 3.0Ghz Single Core

Answer 1

Did you do a low level format, before installing the new version? It is best to do a low level format before reinstalling software. (writes the drive binary to all zeros) Have you tried Maxtor diagnostic tools, just to check the hard drive? Possible bad sectors.

Also test the memory. Although you did not mention any errors when installing XP, which is good, but errors can be and quite often are caused by RAM.

Answer 2

It certainly sounds like a hardware problem.  I would first try reseating the hardware especially the ram.  Completely remove and reinstall it.  As there is 2gb of ram I would assume this is 2 x 1gb.  Try each stick separately, also if the board has onboard graphics try without the graphics card.  My favourite for the culprit would be ram.  If none of these work then I would try another hard drive.