Computer Problems

I get really frustrated when I encounter a challenging computer problem but on the flip side I feel like I manage to be at my best when the challenge feels almost insurmountable. Case is point started last night

I picked up a side project last night while at a birthday party, sister of a friend from work. The issue was clearly hard drive related, she could recover the system to the point of reaching install disk 11 (what the hell was HP thinking!) and then it would hang and refuse to continue. I loaded the system up and started to work through the recovery process and watched it hang every so often on random disks and also random install points. I was convinced the hard drive had failed

Pulled the drive out and threw it in an external enclosure for SATA that I have and the drive came right up, it was blank but was healthy and working fine on data transfer. Put it back in the system and it started to install. Made it back to disk 6 in 9 hours... oddly enough it would not read the fresh copy of windows xp MSDN that I had burned for it. Being an idiot at times this did not trigger the obvious last night, namely the Media drive being bad. Go figure that 8 hours of shut eye would solve the mystery for me.

Install new Media drive from old system laying around and blam it reads the XP disk and is running, doing a second disk check now but I think we have this under control. YAY sleep and tech skills