16 hours to re-load XP

[jft245]

I am working on a friends computer. He thinks he had a virus. When the computer was turned on it would ask for a password(which it never had before) which was hitting the space bar twice and then enter. The windows xp screen would come up and stay on for about 3 minutes, then a blue screen would come on. After pulling the hard drive and running a virus scan on it(three virus' showed up) I tried to reformat and restore the hard drive by using the restore disk from Dell. After 16 hours it is finally starting to "load devices and drivers" and finalizing installation.

Has any one every run into this problem before, and if so any idea of what caused it. The most it has ever taken me to reformat and reload an operating system was about three hours(Windows ME, what a horror show that was). Any ideas or solutions to try would be helpful. I have a feeling when this is done things still will not be right

Thanks in advance.

 

[provenlogic]

Definately not normal. It could be a bad HDD, which could explain why he was having problems in the first place.

Try running a scandisk on the drive and see if that turns anything up

 

[mike_n_herrin]

This is perfectly normal if the CD drivers and smartdrive have not been loaded properly for the installation - depending on how the installation began. If you were to boot off a floppy disk or another DOS based boot utility and the drive cache application like smartdrive (smartdrv.exe) doesn't load properly then XP will take double figure hours to load. I've had it happen to me when I used my own bootable CD to load XP.

It doesn't mean that you still don't have a bad hard drive as PL said.

i have also had it happen to me. i don't recall if it was smartdrive or not, i thought it was some other motherboard specific drivers that the XP boot/install CD didn't recognize and i'd say it took about that long to finally get windows installed.

 

[SantaCBear]

Never had it take that long... I would do a HDD test to be safe.

 

[davy]

i had a 16 hour install once when i installed windows vista on my desktop..

your drive might not be bad, but i never hurts to run a chkdsk when it's done.

 

[jft245]

Update:
It finished at around 8PM last night. When I started XP it took 25 minutes to open and it runs very slow. Took the same hard drive out and put it in an old computer of mine, took the same XP disk and it formated and installed in a little over half an hour. XP runs fine on this computer so I am going to give it to my friend to use until he can afford a new one..Thank God I save parts out of all my old computer. BTW, on my friends computer I tried flashing the BIOS also to no avail, so I think that he some how fred his processor.

Thanks for the replies and suggestions.

 

[Corny]

- bad hard drive (already mentioned)
- HD cache not enabled in bios
- windows not recognizing the HD properly and not using/loading caching