Verifying DMI Question

So today I was helping a friend to recover some information off his laptop that crashed due to him deleting some system files by mistake.

Long and the short is that he bought an external HD I was going to install an operating system to so I could boot from it and save his pictures blah blah.
When I would attempt to boot to this HD it would say HD corrupt and fail during boot-up and end in a blue screen of death.
I reran the system disk and deleted the partition. To try it on my computer thinking maybe his internal HD was corrupt.
I ran the system install on my desktop and when i plugged it back into his computer same thing. So now im thinking either the External HD is corrupt or the XP Home CD is. So I also have a version of Vista that I was going to try. These are both legal copies mind you I have both Original Boxes. This time on my desktop i go boot from CD and it freezes when is should be loading Vista install.

Meh ok reboot remove the external HD so that I can use my computer to play games while his laptop loads Vista and my computer Wont get past Verifying DMI pool. Remove all CD's and the external HD and reboot still nothing. Set Bios to default to no avail. Reset CMOS on Motherboard with the jumper and set last good log in- No luck. Reset jumper again, go back 5 previous attempts and still nothing. Reset jumper one last time to set to default with fail-safe bios loaded nothing. Really unsure where to go from here.. I Can get the computer to boot to CD so I can just start over but dont really want to. Would like to know exactly where I went wrong so it doesnt happen again.

This is the 4th computer i've build and the newest. Build in February of this year

Gigabyte GA-3p43-DS3L MOBO
Pentium 2.8 Processor
Maxtor Sata 150Gig HD
Nvidea Geforce 285
730watt power supply
Artic Cooling Fan
DVD/CD
Floppy

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Do I understand you correctly?
You are trying to install an OS on a remote enclosure or does the hard drive already have the OS and you're using the enclosure to get the files off of the drive?

The external HD didn't have anything on it, I was installing XP on it so I could boot up his computer and transfer files to it.

The desktop computer not wont boot from CD, it freezes with Vista and freezes with XP. Think it may be time to buy a new HD mine had been making strange noises for a while but thought it was just the HD i had bought.


Edit: Just went through some checks and found my harddrive in my desktop wasn't functioning at all. So i removed and replaced with an old one.

Now just need to figure out how to load an OS onto the external HD.

Edited by Pitlatch, 22 June 2009 - 04:09 PM.