I am trying to restore a Dell 8250. It is P4, 2.6ghz with 1gb ram. I am using a 320gb sata hard drive with a sata-eide adapter.

I downloaded and ran the Western Digital lifeguard program and it saw the drive with no problem, set it up and formatted the first 137gb.

Previously to all of this I contacted Dell and got the RECOVERY disks, they over-nighted them to me. (how cool is that?!)

Now comes the *censored*, I put in the CD and it appears to work, then it will freeze when it gets to "checking drive c:..." or it will freeze at "kernel debugger dll", or it will go past those and start copying files, at which point I get happy, and then files will either not be able to be copied or they will be copied incorrectly. Then I get a number of BSOD's: IRQL_not_less_or_equal, or, pagefault_in_non_paged_area, or, "a driver corrupted pool memory used for holding pages destined for disk".

I have looked these up and some sites say heat, some say memory, some say drivers (hard with no OS installed), others say go to recovery console and repair (no use, no OS).

I have removed modem and sound card, lowered memory to 512MB with memory place holders in the open slots, run dban, tried using nlite to install, even tried using a Win98 boot disk and Win2k install disks.

Now I come to you kind folks. Do I keep trying with your suggestions or should I just call it quits, part it out and put them on eBay?

ThanksPAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, and IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, especially, when shown together, point to bad RAM.
What Windows version are you trying to reinstall?You get those BSODs after trying to install windows and skipping the files that wouldn't load right?
Either the CD is scratched or dirty. Or your CD drive is dirty. Do you have another CD drive that you can swap into that machine?The version is XP home with SP2.

No, the BSOD's don't come after skipping files, they come. They take turns making me miserable.

I have swapped out the memory, mixed and matched the 4 sticks that I am using and I still get the errors.

I cleaned the drive and the cd is as brand new as a recovery disk can be, I just opened the little paper envelope today. The other cd's are still sealed. I burned a new COPY of the nlite iso that I had and that disk had no dirt or scratches. There are two drives on the machine, a dvd and cdrw, both read cd's with no problems.Just a little bump.

Still unable to install XP home, same errors come up.

Just my 2cents from a recent experiance regarding install XP...
Is it possible the hard drive is bad? Can you connect it to ANTHER computer and CHECK it. That would exclude all the memory issues and such. I was experianceing semi weird xp install errors on a drive that I thought was good. Main issue was it would intll up to the restart and then loop back to the begining. I tried a bunch of programes and iso's but no luck in figuring the problem. After connecting to a secondary pc I found out it was the drive causing the problems. I RMA'd it to Seagate and just got it back today repaired. Knock on wood, I'm installing it now, we are formating now.

Anyway, Good luck!This is the second drive I using for the installation. The first kept me running in circles so I checked this one from the beginning. It is good, no bad sectors, reads the correct capacity during the install and in the bios.Since the errors point to RAM problem, and you changed the RAM in all possible ways, I'd suspect mobo.I will try a different motherboard this weekend and let you know how it goes. Thanks so far for the responses.Did this Dell ship from the factory with SATA hard drive(s) ? ?
If not you need Dell SATA drivers...the prompt for the SATA drivers comes very EARLY in the setup process but this will not happen if it was originally shipped with an IDE drive.Hi, not sure of the original type of drive. I got this from a Craig's List ad. The service tag brings up the original configuration and this is what is listed for the hard drive: HD,120G,I,7.2K,60G/P,HIT-VAN2

Hard drive
120gb
I - ?
7200rpm
60g/p - ?
HIT-VAN2 - ?

Thanks again.Where's the original drive ? ?
If it hooked up with a flat ribbon cable it was an IDE drive...which i would bet on since you are using a SATA adapter now...The original drive I would guess is with the original owner.

Makes sense about the type of drive it was.