After all this messing around with a laptop it turns out that the stupid default HAL used in the textmode setup of XP was the bloody cause for the computer powering off in the middle of the setup. All I had to do was to hit F7 and choose a non APCI HAL. But it was pretty damned hard to find that out coz by XP bible tells me nothing and it takes ages to trawl google and MS when you are trying variations on what the computer is doing.
