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Carole Cooper recently upgraded her computer and passed on the old one to Jan, having first removed the hard drive which contained all her stuff. Alan (her SO) put the hard drive from Jan's older machine in to replace it. Specs follow:
Jan's old machine: Pentium 150, 32Mb RAM, 2Gb HD, running Windows 98 SE
The new machine: Pentium 4 1.2Gb, 256Mb RAM, HD unknown, running Windows XP
Windows 98 wouldn't run. We got two different error messages, which began:
"Insufficient memory to initialise Windows" and "Unable to initialise VCACHE: Windows protection fault."
Alan tried to reinstall Windows from a CD, and we got another error message:
"Setup has detected a corrupt .CAB file and cannot continue."
He tried this with two separate CDs and got the same message. He then tried formatting the hard drive (Jan keeps all her writing and such on floppy, so no actual data was lost) and I made a Win98 boot disc on my machine. Alan booted form this and tried reinstalling again. Same problem. At this point I left the room for a while, and Alan continued to wrestle, but finally had to go to work.
Now when we try to install Windows, Setup gets as far as "Copying files..." and then throws us back to the command prompt. We can still run the DOS-based word processing programme that Jan prefers to use (thank gods) but obviously her Net access and email are b*gg*r*d and the whizziness of the new computer might as well not exist. I think possibly something wasn't done that should have been done in CMOS Setup when the new hard drive was put in, though I don't know what and am far too scared to mess with it. I really need help with this, because Jan has had such a history of wanting to be more computer-capable, getting something new and then it not working, that she's convinced she's a jinx or cursed or something, and this just reinforces it.
If anyone can offer advice, suggestions, or maybe (and I know we're a long way away, but food, shelter and petrol money will be found) hands-on help, we would be so grateful.
(Sorry to those who really didn't want to read all this waffle: I don't know how to do those cut thingies yet.)
Jan's old machine: Pentium 150, 32Mb RAM, 2Gb HD, running Windows 98 SE
The new machine: Pentium 4 1.2Gb, 256Mb RAM, HD unknown, running Windows XP
Windows 98 wouldn't run. We got two different error messages, which began:
"Insufficient memory to initialise Windows" and "Unable to initialise VCACHE: Windows protection fault."
Alan tried to reinstall Windows from a CD, and we got another error message:
"Setup has detected a corrupt .CAB file and cannot continue."
He tried this with two separate CDs and got the same message. He then tried formatting the hard drive (Jan keeps all her writing and such on floppy, so no actual data was lost) and I made a Win98 boot disc on my machine. Alan booted form this and tried reinstalling again. Same problem. At this point I left the room for a while, and Alan continued to wrestle, but finally had to go to work.
Now when we try to install Windows, Setup gets as far as "Copying files..." and then throws us back to the command prompt. We can still run the DOS-based word processing programme that Jan prefers to use (thank gods) but obviously her Net access and email are b*gg*r*d and the whizziness of the new computer might as well not exist. I think possibly something wasn't done that should have been done in CMOS Setup when the new hard drive was put in, though I don't know what and am far too scared to mess with it. I really need help with this, because Jan has had such a history of wanting to be more computer-capable, getting something new and then it not working, that she's convinced she's a jinx or cursed or something, and this just reinforces it.
If anyone can offer advice, suggestions, or maybe (and I know we're a long way away, but food, shelter and petrol money will be found) hands-on help, we would be so grateful.
(Sorry to those who really didn't want to read all this waffle: I don't know how to do those cut thingies yet.)