ok, It's an old computer that wouldn't start up and had Windows ME installed. I was trying to use a guide to completely start over. I got a Windows ME boot disk (floppy) and ran fdisk, deleted all partitions, and made a new primary partition C: with the label "HOME" and formated it.

It will boot from the XP CD, but it always freezes at "setup is LOADING FILES (kernel debugger dll)..." And once it said something about missing a file and ERROR code 7. I tried booting from the XP floppies too and got the same problem, so I don't think it's a problem with the CD. I looked at this (it's about a different file missing though) and it said that ME is Fat32. Could that be the problem? I tried "sys c: " like it said, but I just got bad command or file name.

Any idea why it won't work? I thought I could just put in the CD and install. This is really ANNOYING. If a Windows install keeps failing with file copying errors, especially (but not only) if it's a different file each time, flaky RAM is often to blame.

You can install XP to a FAT32 partition.
by copying are you talking about the error code 7 or just the normal freezing while loading files? I think that whole error part was a one time thing. I tried again and it still gets STUCK at "setup is loading files (kernel debugger dll)..."

So could that be fixed by buying some new RAM?

edit: also, I successfully installed Debian linux when I couldn't get Windows to work, so I think Windows should be able to install fine if there aren't any errors or whatever.