I have a dell dimension 8200, pentium4 2.0GHz, 512 MB RDRAM, running WINDOWS XP, home edition. The other day I got a "missing NTLDR file" error. Instead of choosing repair, booting from the XP CD, I created 2 NTFS partitions, and tried to install XP in the first partition. The formating part went smoothly. However, after that, I received a few "setup cannot copy " errors. I pressed ESC a few times to continue until I got the blue screen of death. I took the XP CD out, CLEANED it, and shut the pc down. Later I retried the INSTALLATION, but got the same results. Any ideas? :-?
I think I had a similar problem once. I searched for the exact error message on google and found an answer. But I can't remember the exact error message, so can't help you right now. But goolgle isn't hard to use prerookie......... I have read you post several times now and I'm a little confused .............. Your post is tittled ....... HD, RAM, BIOS settings? and yet I see nothing in your post about any of those things .......
As far as your damaged install , why dont you simply do a nice clean install .... it sounds like you have a windows XP restore / Install cd as provided by Dell ......

dl65 Look at this
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/mskbsetup.htm