2 Days to load XP lol

[SThompson86]

Hello, I have a simple question. I have a an old 1999 Era Dell L550R This a Pentium 3 Machine. When I loaded XP on it took 2 days..lol I am wondering if this is really how slow the machine is when loading from a CD. When Xp finally loaded up everything was fast considering it was a 10 year old machine. In my efforts to try and make it faster. I have reset the BIOS to default. I have edited the CDrom settings and turned the DMA on its highest level which is 4. I have also tried 2 different known working cdroms.

I like messing about with old machines for practice, but this slow load time has me puzzled!

Thanks in advanced.

Shane

 

[kagman]

2 Days.. dam... Pentium 3 systems where around when xp was sold so its not the cpu. Perhaps it was the CD itself that the computer did not like..

But 2 Days.. hell no... lol....

 

[SThompson86]

It was a Dell XP Pro SP3 original disc. but yea.. 2 days LOL

 

[kagman]

I would have tried to install windows xp with a cd that had either service pack 1 or service pack 2 on it. Just an idea..

 

[Crollins]

Well you did try 2 other cdroms... I would check the following:

1. Do hardware tests on the rest of the unit especially the ram and hard drive
2. Possibly bad ide cables?
3. Try a different xp cd
4. I would also check to see if the cdrom drive is recognized right in the bios. I have seen some old motherboards in which the drive was recognized wrong and it thought it was like a 2x drive speed or something Try flashing the bios to the latest firmware.

 

[SThompson86]

It could be the memory or something because I tried to load Linux Mint Live onto it last night, and it could not handle it.

 

[Crollins]

Defiantely possible... try using memtest 86 and see if the ram passes or not

 

[SThompson86]

Yea ile try some things on it when I get home. I like messing around with these older systems for practice.

 

[kagman]

Even if the system saw the cdrom drive as a 2x drive, it still would not take 2 days. A few hours yes lol...

 

[Crollins]

True... wouldnt take that long but I'm just throwing out possibilities that Ive seen Either way never hurts to have updated the bios

 

[hondablaster]

Sometimes the HDD can be set to a silent or low performance setting. Often the solution is to reset BIOS or change it to something more reasonable. Unfortunately with Dells resetting the BIOS and changing setting can be tricky sometimes you need two sets of jumper pins.

Your situation happened to me and I was stumped like you. I found later that I needed to place a jumper on a pins that were for modifying the BIOS and then going into the BIOS to change the settings. After I was satisfied I then switched them back to lock in the changes. The installation time went from one day and a night to about 20 minutes on performance mode.

For your situation you may want to find the manual for the computer in question. With the my junk Dell I found a technicians PDF file which informed me of the strange BIOS settings and how to change those settings to something usable.

 

[SThompson86]

I upgraded the Bios and that gave me some more options for the hard drive. I turned on LBA/large file support and I turned PIO on auto and set Ultra to Mode 4 which is the highest. I did these same settings for the CD rom and hard drive, and Its still running just as slow. I am going to run memtest86 in a bit.

 

[onetech4all]

Re:

I installed over the weekend Windows XP Home Edition SP3 on a laptop from Dell, Pentium 3, 512 MB, 20GB, for my little brother. It took overall about 2-3 hours.
Try an external CDROM see if it speeds up.

 

[SThompson86]

Also to note it is really thrashing when it is accessing the CDrom. It does the thrashing with both of my cdrom drives

 

[Eddie]

I'd try a different IDE cable as was suggested. I'd problems installing windows 7 on my own machine until I changed the cable.

 

[SThompson86]

Well.. I after I gave up trying to load Linux Mint, I loaded another Dell SP3 CD, and the machine would not even boot it. I then put in a burned copy of XP, and its rolling fast through the install like it should.

My guess is this machine does not like Dell OEM discs or Linux Mint.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

 

[Alan22]

When I loaded XP on it took 2 days..lol I am wondering if this is really how slow the machine is when loading from a CD.

This is a joke, right?

 

[SThompson86]

Yea I am serious about 38 hours.

 

[vdub12]

Wow your patient, I would have quit after 2 or 3 hours if it wasn't almost done.

You definitely have some hardware problems. in 2 days you could load an 8088 with XP if the installer would let it load.

 

[Bobbing]

Did you peek at the event viewer? Any bad block errors?