Windows XP forum: BSoD during WinXP install

Hi,

I've run into a problem that I've never encountered before, and I'm hoping someone can help me here ...

My dad bought a Toshiba Satellite L305-S5908 laptop, 2.0GHz dual-core with 4Gs of RAM. It came pre-installed with Vista. He *hates* Vista, so asked me to reload it to XP. I had successfully done exactly that with my husband's laptop a few months ago with no problems (his is an HP laptop). I found the proper XP drivers for my dad's laptop, then tried to do what I always do on a clean load - set the BIOS to boot off the DVD-R drive and pop in my XP Pro Corp disc with SP2 slipstreamed in. As I said it's never given me any grief before.

This time was different. The load started off okay, but never even gets to the screen where you choose the options to load XP, enter recovery console, etc. Just *before* this screen is supposed to come up, I get the dreaded BSoD that reads as follows:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78D2524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Truthfully, I have *no* idea what any of that means, other than the fact that I can't load XP. So I did what I always *used* to do, many moons ago - I booted up using a WinME bootable CD, ran FDISK and deleted all partitions on the HD, then formatted using DOS, in the hopes that this would solve any problems, but nope - still getting BSoD.

Well, I've actually got a few copies of XP kicking around, so I tried an original XP CD, XP Pro Corp x64, XP MCE - you get the idea. And *exactly* the same thing happens with each one. I even tried booting using a Win2k Server CD, in the hopes that I could at least reach the recovery console, but nope - nada. Although it was a little weird - when I tried booting using Win2k Server, I never got the BSoD, but the install *did* freeze at the message "Setup is starting Windows 2000", and then nothing - in other words, at the same place where it's going to BSoD in an XP install, it's freezing in a Win2k install.

I had read somewhere that the problem is that Vista writes to the MBR differently than XP, and I had not taken that into account - hence the reason I wanted to at least be able to access the recovery console to run "fixboot" and "fixmbr", but I can't. I even downloaded an .iso file that had *just* the files to run the recovery console, and I get BSoD with *that*. So obviously, something about the laptop doesn't like XP, but I'm damned if I can figure out what the problem is. So right now, I'm sitting over a brick (to borrow a term from a hooped iPhone) with no way of solving my problem.

Sorry if this all seems rather long-winded, but I figured too much information was problem better than not enough. I hope someone out there can help.

Thanks,

Grace