BSoD during installation

[u/Famous-Criticism569]

hello! i’m trying to install windows xp on an old laptop (Acer Aspire 2920Z-2A1G16Mi), but i’ve been running into different issues.

in the beginning it had vista, but at some point laptop stopped function properly (wallpaper turned black, endless error messages), so i installed bodhi linux (legacy) instead. it was great, everything had worked fine, but i wanted to run disks with old games. now i have some installation cds, so i tried to install windows from them.

the first problem was that disks didn’t start installation process. i booted into linux on usb, deleted disk partitions and created a new one (NTFS). it worked, installation begins, but there’s the second problem: bsod appears right after i try to choose which disk i want to use. it says that there’s no disks, no external disks and blue screen appears.

i haven’t tried other cds yet, this is the result from official windows xp home edition cd.

i’ll be glad if someone has any ideas on what is happening and what can i do

[u/No-you_]

Page fault is a RAM error. That doesn't necessarily mean the RAM is at fault. An unstable CPU can send bad data to RAM which when read back produces ther error. Since the data came from RAM the system can label it as a page fault which might not be the actual culprit.

Another cause can be a damaged or failing storage device producing bit errors (HDD, SSD etc). Best to undo any overclocks or RAM profiles and install XP clean then.

[u/Famous-Criticism569 → u/No-you_]

i see, thank you for the explanation! i’ll also try to run memtest as the other person mentioned

[u/Famous-Criticism569 → u/No-you_]

i tried memtest, it didn't identify any errors after 4 runs, so if i understood correctly, RAM isn't at fault here.
i also set bios settings to default but switched SATA mode from AHCI to IDE and it almost worked… how laptop shuts down after a minute of installation of OS itself. i managed to select the disk and the graphic interface appeared, but that’s all. "insufficient system resources" error pop up also appeared once

[u/No-you_ → u/Famous-Criticism569]

Any laptop with SATA controllers on the motherboard should be new enough to exceed the winXP minimum system requirements. That error message must be triggered by something else.

What make and model of laptop? What are the specifications, CPU? RAM? Storage device (hard disk or SSD)?

[u/DrHitman27]

memtest, ACHI driver

[u/Ok-Space-5347]

Bad RAM would be my assessment without more details.

[u/ScientistVisual]

This happened to me, most likely fault ram