I am attempting to reformat my son's laptop, and have one big screwed up mess.

the situation: I successfully used my copy of WinXP Pro slipstreamed with SP 3 to reformat a new Dell XPS laptop back down to XP. Went seamlessly and quickly. Since I slipstreamed in SATA drivers for that install, I started from scratch in NLITE, reslipstreamed the service pack, burned the ISO to CD, and began the reformat. The first time through, I got a ramdisk.sys error, so I deleted that from the nlite install and started over again.

Upon that install, and 4 subsequent ones, when it gets to the install part, there are several hundred files which is says "system cannot copy."
I finally did a completely vanilla nlite slipstream, with no tweaks whatsover, and it still threw up over 200 errors.
I persisted to the end of the install, but it won't get me even as far as installing the ethernet controller, because it says windows installer service cannot be accessed.

I tried re-registering windows installer, tried the 4.5 hotpatch, and tried removing and replacing installer files, none of which worked.

So I tried using my original winxp disk to do a repair, which of course it would not do. So I am attempting to do a reformat with that disk, and then manually apply all the upgrades. It gets part way through, then throws up a stop error at 0x0000007e, [co/sus. adress F786BOBF

This is a Dell Latitude 820. It will still limp into the windows install currently on it, (the NLITE one which is faulty) so I updated the BIOS to A09, which didn't help.

One other clue seems to be that the dvd-rw drive only detests the install cds, either one of them, about half the time, so I don't know if it's a faulty drive. Would it work to put the nlite ISO on a flash key?

I would first try installing with a vanilla WinXP disk that is known to work.
-If possible set the SATA mode in the BIOS to IDE emulation (which means no HDD drivers needed, and no F6 floppy needed)

If the Vanilla/IDE method does not work, you probably have hardware issues.
-If it works try native SATA mode (BIOS) and installation with an F6 floppy. If you have no floppy drive try integrating the native SATA (Intel AHCI?) drivers with nLite, nothing else.

If that does not work you might report back and upload some files.

It sounds like you may have a bad drive. Try downloading imgburn and copy a CD/burn ISO with it. Use the verify function. If the verify fails then your drive may be bad. Laptop CD drives don't seem to live long. I've had to replace my CD drive in both my IBM Thinkpad and Dell Inspiron.

After burning multiple disks, fiddling with the sata drivers, this finally turned out to be apparently corrupt source files. Although the hard drive copy of the xp original install disk had worked with nlite for two other installations with no issues at all, something evidently got mangled. I recopied the contents of the disk, and it worked like a charm.

Meaning that one should try the utterly obvious. before banging one's head into the keyboard for hours and hours.

Thanks for the responses!

Erin C-H

At what speed did you burn it? 52x?