Question: I have a client with a Dell Latitude D610 laptop with Windows XP Pro. Apparently the OS became corrupted not sure due to what at this point, but it wouldn't even let me go to the recovery console - it would freeze after I would select the Windows installation and never ask for the admin password or go to the command prompt. It would hardly even get past the searching for previous installations part in the Windows setup when I decided to just delete the existing partition and reinstall Windows. It would often freeze at that screen and took several restarts before it got through to the setup options. When it finally did, I deleted the existing OS partition, leaving the utility partition, created a new NTFS partition and set it to do the slow format. One thing is that it seems that the format was hanging as it seemed to stay at 4% forever before I just went to bed. When I came down this morning I was greeting with an error. It had gotten through the format and when Windows XP setup got to the point where it says "Setup will complete in approximately: 39 minutes," it halted, and gave an error.
The setuperr.log has this information:
Error:
The signature for Windows XP Professional Setup is invalid. The error code is 6ba. The RPC server is unavailable.
Fatal Error:
Setup failed to install the product catalogs. This is a fatal error. The setup log files should contain more information.
I clicked OK which opened up the setuperr.log which basically stated the error again and then clicked Close on which the system rebooted, restarted Windows XP setup (from the loaded files - not the CD setup) and then gave the same error at the same place a few minutes into starting again.
I'm finding very little on this on the web, but I'm beginning to think that it's a bad hard drive I'm dealing with. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.