Questions regarding failed XP installation

TimW

Hi all

I've just started reading Sybex's book on 70-270 and I've got a couple of questions from the first chapter. I hate moving on with lingering questions, so maybe someone can help me.

The book refers to a couple of things you can do to help diagnose failed installations - to add the /sos switch inside Boot.ini, and to view the setupact.log and setuperr.log files. That's all very well but, maybe I'm missing the point here, if the installation failed, how the heck do you access the files? I mean, I can access the files great on my successful installation, but if the installation just gives a BSOD and reboots, I don't see how one can either edit or consult the files.

Apologies if I'm being incredibly dumb!

Webmaster

A failed installation does not always mean the OS will not boot at all. Reading the installation logfiles is more like a check to see if the installation went entirely ok.

There are several ways to access the files if the OS won't start including:
- Starting the recovery console from the Setup CD
- place the disk in another system (I realize this is not always an option at home, but on the job this is usually a quick and dirty method.)
- Try booting in safe mode.

You may also want to remove all the hardware from your system that you don't need to complete the installation (i.e. sound cards, modem etc.) to see if that is causing the blue screen.