Can't install Win XP x64 bit on freshly formatted drive

I've been having some problems lately where I get the BSOD Stop:0x00000050 screen. I haven't installed any new devices or software that should be causing this error. I decided I was going to do a fresh install, and reformatted the drive. Now when I try install WIN XP x64 bit (which is what I had previously), the install gets almost all the way finished (about 4 mins left to go) and I get BSOD Stop:0x0000001A. I've tried twice, and the same thing each time.

I'm stuck!

I can't run any diagnostics because I can't get to Windows, and I can't get windows to install. Is there some sort of program I can run from the DVD/CD drive that would boot from that drive and run without windows?

Or is there something I can do to resolve easily. My drive is already formatted so there is nothing to worry about wiping out. I just saw something about the FDisk command. Should I try to run that, then re-format and re-install windows?

Help, I'm stuck!

Thanks for any advice you can give me

It looks like you might have faulty RAM.
Both errors might indicate that.
If you have more then 1 RAM chip try removing 1 to check if that might be an issue. If it fails, try only with the one you removed (ie if you have 2 chips).

Besides possible memory problems a now bad data cable, optical drive which may need a lens cleaner, and a finger marked or scratched disk can cause installation problems. For testing to see if any if more then one dimm is faulty you can create either a boot floppy or cd-r for running the free tool memtest.

For the cd-r version you will need to be able to burn an ISO type disk image onto a blank cd-r and boot from that. You leave memtest running for several hours in order to continually repeat a series of stress tests. The latest version fixes a few bugs in memory address errors. http://www.memtest.org/

it was bad mem modules

I was starting to suspect bad RAM, because some of the errors mentioned Page Fault. So I took out half the RAM. Windows went through the setup process (much faster this time also) and completed installation. It ran fine the rest of the night. So I bought some new RAM and it's been fine since. I haven't run MemTest yet, but plan to, in order to test the rest.

Thanks for the replies and advice!

Memtest is an old and reliable tool there and free. If you lack a floppy drive and need a program to burn the iso image to disk there's a few free cd/dvd burning programs that work with iso images being DeepBurner, BurnOn, and the newer StarBurn.

The free version of BurnOn is found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/ The one note on that one is the need to run the System File Checker after 3 or 4 good burns if you are running XP. Kind of a pain in the ... Other then that annoyance it has been reliable in both XP and Vista alike.

For DeepBurner there are two types of free versions seen at http://www.deepburner.com/?r=download

The top tool now supporting Blu Ray is StarBurn with that found at two places. http://www.binarymagic.com/free.html and http://www.rocketdivision.com/download_starburn.html