Since you are going from ME to XP, it's quite possible that the motherboard and/or other devices are not supported by the newer OS. This can cause an installation to hang. As a minimum, make sure your motherboard BIOS is the latest. Make sure your RAM is adequate. This will mean 250 megs as a minimum with 512 preferred. Are there on board devices on the MB you can disable such as sound? In short, hardware compatibility is essential or XP may display the behavior you are seeing.
Ok, it's a long one but here goes:
I am upgrading a WinME system to WinXP Home. I purchased a new Maxtor 80gb drive, WinXP with SP2 integrated and Partition Magic.
I first attempted to copy the existing ME partition to the new drive. Failed miserably. Tried a direct copy, tried to expand it to fit, tried making it hidden, no dice. Constantly got Error 1, something about not being permitted with the current OS or something-or-other.
So, figured lets dump the old drive, install XP new on the new drive, then just use the transfer wizard to get the old stuff to the new drive.
During install, XP checks the drive, copies the files over, reboots and begins the install process. Then, it hangs while 'installing devices'. Tried to reboot, it picked up where it left off and promptly hung again.
Now, I have an older network card that gave me grief when I installed it with ME, so I thought maybe it was the problem. I pulled the card, fdisk'd the drive and started again. Now it hangs right after the re-boot, while the WinXP logo with the blue bar is up.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? I've never had this kind of grief installing something clean!
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