iraito wrote on 2021-09-16, 20:22:

It feels like a curse but this keeps happening, the machine is in my signature (athlon XP) any help is much appreciated.
https://streamable.com/42zdal

Off the top of my head, in whichever order is easiest :

Disable any overclocks (might also want to try downclocking )
Inspect the motherboard for any obviously bad (leaky/bulged) capacitors
Make sure the PSU is up to feeding your likely 5V hungry Athlon XP based system
Test the RAM (memtest)
Test the hard drive or try with a different one
Test your Windows install media on another machine or in virtual machine

A bad HDD or cable... or flakey controller can also cause this.

I had that issue once using an HDD that had previously been formatted using a GPT instead of an MBR. To fix it, I had to run the WinXP install disc, choose repair, select the installation, get to the console, and then type "fixmbr" and "fixboot". Then I was good to go.

Apparently a lot of those "ntdll.dll not found" and other errors are slightly misleading, because it's not that it was the only file not found, or not loaded correctly. It's that WinXP's bootloader couldn't find anything at all, but that was the first file it failed on.

+1

FIXBOOT and FIXMBR often saved my day in the XP times.

By the way, many errors happened due to trouble with CD-ROM drives.
For some reason, read errors and missing files damaged many XP installations.
Not sure why they happened, though.

I highly recommend installing Windows XP from a flash devices, like a CF card thus.

Programs like "Rufus" can be used to create a bootable XP installation medium from ISO file.
It lets the flash card appear as either a virtual CD-ROM/El Torito, a ZIP drive (?) or a bootable HDD.
It even has a BIOS fix for the latter.

That way, someone can easily install XP via card reader.

An USB pen drive may also do, of course.
Or an SD card - many laptops have an SD slot built-in.

Happened to me once and was due to a faulty memory stick.

All excellent advices, in the end it was the RAM but not at the hardware level, it was a matter of BIOS settings, it was set to SPD and the timings were wrong , now it's set to automatic and everything works correctly.

iraito wrote on 2021-09-17, 11:31:

All excellent advices, in the end it was the RAM but not at the hardware level, it was a matter of BIOS settings, it was set to SPD and the timings were wrong , now it's set to automatic and everything works correctly.

Told you so. 😁

iraito wrote on 2021-09-17, 11:31:

All excellent advices, in the end it was the RAM but not at the hardware level, it was a matter of BIOS settings, it was set to SPD and the timings were wrong , now it's set to automatic and everything works correctly.

I'm glad you got it working! 😃👍

Glad to hear that. 👍

I bumped into a similar problem with my A7V133-C / Athlon 1200 build: Intalling Win98SE, a rather mundane and routine work for any retro computing hobbyist that I've done dozens of times, kept kicking me back to DOS prompt. Turned out to be an unstable RAM stick.

dormcat wrote on 2021-09-17, 14:50:

Glad to hear that. 👍

I bumped into a similar problem with my A7V133-C / Athlon 1200 build: Intalling Win98SE, a rather mundane and routine work for any retro computing hobbyist that I've done dozens of times, kept kicking me back to DOS prompt. Turned out to be an unstable RAM stick.

Yeah it's pretty common, if it wasn't for many things going on in life maybe i would've guessed it, there's always vogons for a nudge in the right direction though.