Hi. I have a two year old home-built system based on Gigabyte GA-MA69-S2H MoBo, with AMD 3800+, 2x 1Gb of generic DDR2 ram and a WD Sata 500Gb drive, plus a couple of optical drives.
After my 12yr old son started doing ‘homework' on it, a number of apparently unrelated problems materialised (sound errors, vga errors, programmes freezing etc.), I eventually decided to do a reinstall of XP Pro.
I thought I'd take the opportuity to upgrade the HD so bought a second SATA drive, a 1Tb Samsung drive last week.I decided to use this to run XP, and after transferring all the files off the old HD, move this into a USB caddy as backup storage. The install on the new HD succeeded, but I got an eraly bluescreen, screwed up transferring MediaMonkey database across so MM woud not load at all), and all in all was sufficiently worried that I had already messed up what I wanted to be a pristine OS that I decided to redo the install.
This failed- the startup ran, then the EULA, then the partition and format, but when the system rebooted, instead of the option to select to boot from CDROM (‘press any key'), the reboot intialised the CD.
Thinking the new HD may be a dud, I then tried to install onto the old 500Gb drive, and this failed also.
I then ran memtest on the DDR2 RAM, got an all-clear on both sticks. Starting to run out of ideas, I reset the BIOS and cleared CMOS- but this did not help. In fact it made things worse, as now, the XP disc was taking far too long to initialisise and the install was hanging randomly.
Reasoning that with two apparently OK RAM sticks, two separate HDs and two optical drives, the problem had to be hardware, and could only be Mobo or CPU, I bit the bullet and reinstalled all the components on a new mobo (ASRock).
Sadly, this did not sort out the problem. I have this same problem still- neither HD will accept the installation, which keeps restarting from scratch each time the system reboots after loading the XP files (following reformatting the partition).
The only peripherals I have plugged in is the USB mouse and keyboard, and I've had thw same problem after sawpping for an PS2 keyboard..
I have downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD, but am not technical enough to know which utilities to use of how to interpret the results.
Can anybody help please ?!
After my 12yr old son started doing ‘homework' on it, a number of apparently unrelated problems materialised (sound errors, vga errors, programmes freezing etc.), I eventually decided to do a reinstall of XP Pro.
I thought I'd take the opportuity to upgrade the HD so bought a second SATA drive, a 1Tb Samsung drive last week.I decided to use this to run XP, and after transferring all the files off the old HD, move this into a USB caddy as backup storage. The install on the new HD succeeded, but I got an eraly bluescreen, screwed up transferring MediaMonkey database across so MM woud not load at all), and all in all was sufficiently worried that I had already messed up what I wanted to be a pristine OS that I decided to redo the install.
This failed- the startup ran, then the EULA, then the partition and format, but when the system rebooted, instead of the option to select to boot from CDROM (‘press any key'), the reboot intialised the CD.
Thinking the new HD may be a dud, I then tried to install onto the old 500Gb drive, and this failed also.
I then ran memtest on the DDR2 RAM, got an all-clear on both sticks. Starting to run out of ideas, I reset the BIOS and cleared CMOS- but this did not help. In fact it made things worse, as now, the XP disc was taking far too long to initialisise and the install was hanging randomly.
Reasoning that with two apparently OK RAM sticks, two separate HDs and two optical drives, the problem had to be hardware, and could only be Mobo or CPU, I bit the bullet and reinstalled all the components on a new mobo (ASRock).
Sadly, this did not sort out the problem. I have this same problem still- neither HD will accept the installation, which keeps restarting from scratch each time the system reboots after loading the XP files (following reformatting the partition).
The only peripherals I have plugged in is the USB mouse and keyboard, and I've had thw same problem after sawpping for an PS2 keyboard..
I have downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD, but am not technical enough to know which utilities to use of how to interpret the results.
Can anybody help please ?!
