Upgrading to XP Pro

[Aaron]

I have a dell ispiron 1300 laptop, with Win XP & SP2. Thanks to my college,
I also have access to the MSDNAA software site, so I decided to download XP
Pro (with service pack 2) for my laptop (free through the program, after
all).

So after doing the advisor program thing, which tells me there should be no
hardware conflicts, the file downloads as an iso, and I burn it to a disc
and run the installer.

It gets to the point where it's copying a bunch of installation files to the
C drive, and then tells me, in essence, just before completion "cannot copy
axjf317s.sys to <C drive pathname>, as it is missing". I try to skip and
reboot, but the installation will not continue when it sees that file is
missing.

And I download it a second time, and this time it's missing ahodpamy.sys and
again cannot properly boot into the installation. What the heck? (I also did
a hash check on both download attempts--the hashes appeared to be the same)

Also none of these files return results on google, that do I do?

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I have a dell ispiron 1300 laptop, with Win XP & SP2. Thanks to my
college, I also have access to the MSDNAA software site, so I decided to
download XP Pro (with service pack 2) for my laptop (free through the
program, after all).

So after doing the advisor program thing, which tells me there should be
no hardware conflicts, the file downloads as an iso, and I burn it to a
disc and run the installer.

It gets to the point where it's copying a bunch of installation files to
the C drive, and then tells me, in essence, just before completion "cannot
copy axjf317s.sys to <C drive pathname>, as it is missing". I try to skip
and reboot, but the installation will not continue when it sees that file
is missing.

And I download it a second time, and this time it's missing ahodpamy.sys
and again cannot properly boot into the installation. What the heck? (I
also did a hash check on both download attempts--the hashes appeared to be
the same)

Also none of these files return results on google, that do I do?

Try burning the disk at a lower speed. Higher speed burns can sometimes
produce the problems you describe. Alternately, it can be an indication of
memory or disk problems, and these can be hard (i.e. expensive) to diagnose.

HTH
-pk

 

[Ace]

Knoppix includes two programs that can be used to diagnose memory and
disk; namely Memtest and SmartCTL.
Knoppix comes as a bootable ISO you can burn to CD/DVD.

Memtest can be run immediately from the "knoppix:" boot prompt, inspect
the help messages under F2 and F3 when presented with the boot prompt.
Note that you can also check the Knoppix disk itself with one of the
commands listed in the help messages.
SmartCTL is available as a command line utility after booting either into
text mode or into the KDE desktop (default).
Open a console (See the black terminal screen icon on the lower left) and
type in 'smartctl --help' for instructions.
Your first hard drive is called 'hda', your second is 'hdb', etc.
Common usage of SmartCTL would be:
'smartctl --smart=on --offlineauto=on --saveauto=on /dev/hda'
To turn on S.M.A.R.T. features on your harddrive; then:
'smartctl -t long /dev/hda'
To initiate the extended disk self-test.
You can still use the drive normally during testing, but the test will
complete sooner if you let smartctl run on it's own.
These tests are non-destructive.
To print attributes and self test errors after testing:
'smartctl --attributes --log=selftest --quietmode=errorsonly /dev/hda'
You can strip the '--quietmode=errorsonly' from the above command to view
the entire logfile that is created during the test.
Note you should not use quotes, ofcourse.

If you happen to have SATA drives, 'hda' would likely be 'sda' instead.
You may verify your harddrive's naming under Knoppix by simply looking on
the KDE desktop, your drive and it's partitions will be shown there as
disk icons, and their name is also the device name.
'hda0' would be harddrive 1, partition 1, for example.