STOP error msg when booting

I get a STOP error message 0x00000050 when trying to install windows. It happens immediately after I "Agree and press F8".

I shutdown the computer one day and the next, I come back to it and it tells me before I even hit any sort of windows loading screen that config.sys is missing or corruted and that I should try and repair windows through the CD. I tried this at the start of my troubleshooting and it gave me the same stop error after chosing which OS the repair ( I only have the one installationg on this disk).

It's a 1.5 year old Western Digi Raptor (8MB cache).

Any clue on what the heck is going on here?

I think it might be a bad HDD but I'm really not sure...

Thanks.

Thanks. I'll try what you suggested when I get home tonight. I actually tried an alternative MB, an alternative HDD and a variety of memory configurations (2x1gb sticks, 1x1gb stick, tried the other stick by itself aswell, and so on). With the other HDD I didn't get that error, but I also didn't want to format the other HDD so I didn't go further than accepting the agreement.

The other HDD I used was the one out of my old xbox It;s all i had! Hopefully I can find another HDD to try out soon. Ordered another HDD from NCIX yesterday anyhow.

Anyone have any other thoughts?

I have seen that error many times. Most of the time it's due to a bad hard drive, sometimes bad RAM is the problem. A scratched CD can cause installation problems, but they're usually file copying errors.

You might try using a 3rd party disk utility to completely wipe the suspect drive before installing Windows on it. Hiren's Boot CD has many such utilities. it's not hard to find using Google. Wiping clean many a drive has gotten me past the BSOD during installation.

Ok...I got the drive to work again!

For some reason, something was corrupt. I had no errors reported from the DOS utility provided by Western Digital. I then figured it was time to write zeros to the first and last million sectors of the drive through the utility. Turns out this worked!

Too bad I lost all data.

Anyone know why this would happen? Things are going good now but I'm still clueless as to why the drive got corrupted...

Thanks everyone. Hopefully this thread will help others with similar problems. I know I've learnt (learned? lol) a lot through this whole ordeal.

=)

I would have waited on the new drive before your zero filled the new one, could have got some data back. There are some utilities too that can reconstruct scrubbed data. But anyway, good on you.

I would say there are too many variables for why your partition table puked on its self, but I would lean toward power or virus intrusion.