clean XP install hangs

I have been trying (all weekend!) to install a clean copy of XP pro on my laptop. The drive is repartitioned and reformatted and I have tried both NTFS and FAT. I have tried with and without set up disks, using a win98 boot disk.

The install counts down from 39 mins to 34 mins and then the screen just blanks out. I know it is completely off because I have some broken pixels on the screen which I don't see. It seems like the laptop is still on but there is no CD/HD or floppy activity by the looks of it. I have left it for 2 hrs to see whether it was really working but having video problems but nothing happened.

PLEASE HELP, I tried to do this for 2 days and finally gave up at 12:45 this morning. The CD does work, because I used it on my PC first with the 6 setup disks.

Thanks, Caroline.

P.S. When I now try to install W2K back on it, it won't install either, does the same thing.

What hardware are you running? Are you sure everything is compatible/able to run xp? Kinda sounds like your hard drive might be corrupted, expecially since w2k won't work either.
http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/sit...7.html?doctype= has a tool you can d/l to make a bootable floppy to test your hdd.
HTH

Thanks, I'll try that. The HD was working fine under w2k. I backed everything up and then repartitioned and formatted, figuring that would be the cleanest way. The HDD is recognized without a problem by other different boot utils I downloaded and tried and it reformats etc..

Thanks Caroline.

I had this happen to me several times on different systems and found that if I disconnected one of the Cdrom drives (if you have 2), the W2K or XP installation worked fine. Reconnect the drive after the install and all works fine.