I recently bought an external 160gb USB harddrive, I intended to use the HD to store my MPEGs, MP3s, photos & games.
I transferred all of my MPEGs & MP3s to the new drive and they all work fine.I then uninstalled all of my games in order to reinstall them on the new drive. I then attempted to reinstall the games (GTA San Andreas, Star Wars Battlefront, Doom3, Sims2) on to the external drive. Upon installation each game gets a few minutes into the installation process before my PC freezes up and I have to manually reboot. This happened with all of the games on several occasions.

After several attempts I decided to switch off the external drive & reinstall the games on to my primary HD, however now the same thing happens when attempting to install to that HD too with 2 of the games (GTA & Doom3), PC freezes up after 5-10 mins of installation. All of the games were originally installed on this drive with my current setup without any problems. 2 of the games (battlefront & Sims2) reinstalled fine on my original HD, so once again I attempted to install them to the new drive & PC frooze up.
Also the PC has crashed on 2 occasions, a blue screen momentarily appears with lots of text (I have no idea what is says, its only on screen for a second) and the system reboots itself, this happened when the PC was connected to Kazaa and on reboot the file I was downloading has completely disappeared.
The PC is around 2 years old, has a 2.6ghz processor and 512mb of RAM and a Geforce FX 5200 gfx card. I have never had any problems until now although I have noticed that the PC hasn't been shutting down properly recently on quite a few occassions, having to be manually powered off.

So far I have tried the following, none of which make any difference to the installation problem;


Formatted the external drive
Ensured Virus definitions are up to date and done a full scan (Norton)
Emptied Windows 'TEMP' folder
Updated 'Installshield' engine
Checked that I don't have a bad stick of RAM using DocMem
Ran Scandisk
Scanned with Ad-Aware & Spybot
Increased Virtual memory size

Can anyone please offer any advice or assistance at all?

either the blue screen is a GPF, of a Physical Memory Dump. But have you tried to disable all of your spyware programs? They might sense a file that seems contagious and try and stop the installation process. That will make the CPU work more, and probablly cause the computer to freeze. Now, do you have a PC or a Notebook. If you have a PC, make sure that you installed the device drive, just in case. Try every thing imaginable, but do not format the original hard drive.