Help!! XP won't install on new system

W

woodshedder

New member
Ok, I'm dumbfounded.
Mobo is Asus P4PE-x
P4 2.4
WD 80gb hd
512 mb ram
ATI video card
M-audio omni studio w/delta 66

Had computer running with win 98. Lots of hanging and freezing. Bought XP with hopes of fixing said hanging and freezing. Reformatted c: drive to NTFS, and began loading xp. Now when xp gets to the loading the drivers part, it ALWAYS freezes. No error, no nothing. I mean always. I have restarted and tried to reinstall at least 25 times. Same thing. I have checked and rechecked BIOS, I am completely confused. Someone please help.

Regards,
Boarman
 
Could be lots of things but it sounds like you got a hardware prob. Check to make sure heatsinks are seated, fans spin, no dirt, and connections inside computer all tight. Download a program called memtest. It's a freebie program that tests your memory. If you get errors you need to either time the memory slower or get new memory. Could also have bad sectors on a hard disk? hear any weird clicking? Finally bad power supply. Swap with a buddy and see if a another one makes a difference. There's tons of other things that can go wrong but those are worth a look...
 
Alright, I have checked fans, heatsinks, etc. I have just about taken the whole thing apart and put it back together again. Everything in the computer is less than a month old.

I will try memtest.

If I have bad sectors, how can I check without any os running? I have made a bootdisk from ultimate boot disk. I will check it.

Power Supply is Zalman. Could be defective, I guess, but they are known for their excellent products.

Thanks Daffy
 
If you're starting over you could just format the drive as Fat32 with a win98 boot disk. Then you could run a thorough scandisk from a win98 CD. You can actually install XP on a FAT32 and it has a tiny performance advantage over NTFS. I prefer FAT32 because it's easier to get in via the dos promt and dink around if something weird happens and XP gets fugged up.

Another thing I've seen occasionally is undervolt. Check your bios and see what things are running at. You might try upping the CPU voltage a tiny bit as I've seen machines do what your is doing because they weren't running the CPU at the specified voltage. Could be anything though... Just figured I'd throw some ideas out..
 
woodshedder said:
Ok, I'm dumbfounded.
Mobo is Asus P4PE-x
P4 2.4
WD 80gb hd
512 mb ram
ATI video card
M-audio omni studio w/delta 66

Had computer running with win 98. Lots of hanging and freezing. Bought XP with hopes of fixing said hanging and freezing. Reformatted c: drive to NTFS, and began loading xp. Now when xp gets to the loading the drivers part, it ALWAYS freezes. No error, no nothing. I mean always. I have restarted and tried to reinstall at least 25 times. Same thing. I have checked and rechecked BIOS, I am completely confused. Someone please help.

Regards,
Boarman
Click to expand...

Did you try running the installation with only a barebones system?

Start off with only the video card installed and add everthing later if it goes through.
 
I just had to do a reinstall for my brother's system (was running win ME, not xp, but the idea's the same)

First, do your installs with the minimum of hardware in the machine, and only add in cards one at a time after you've installed and booted successfully. This saves a lot of headaches and helps you pinpoint where problems may lie.

You can check the disk without an OS by using a bootdisk with scandisk on it. Use the 'thorough' option in scandisk. It will take really long depending on HD size, but it finds the bad sectors.

The same problem I had with my brother's machine turned out ot be faulty memory combined with a HD with bad sectors. Swapped them out and the install went through just fine and the crashes he had stopped.
 
Yeh it could be dodgy RAM.

Way way back when I bought a 486 preloaded with WIN3.1 and 16MB ram. It ran fine. I thought I'd upgrade to OS2 Warp. I'd get all the way through to the 47th installation disk, and it would just hang. Eventually took it to IBM, & they found the defective ram. Windows was happy enough, as it probably never used the extra ram, but os2 being a 'true' 32 bit os could see the dodgy stuff.

Could be a similar situation to 98 & XP.

Also a good idea to use FAT32 over NTFS as suggested by daffydrunk
 
woodshedder said:
Ok, I'm dumbfounded.
Mobo is Asus P4PE-x
P4 2.4
WD 80gb hd
512 mb ram
ATI video card
M-audio omni studio w/delta 66

Had computer running with win 98. Lots of hanging and freezing. Bought XP with hopes of fixing said hanging and freezing. Reformatted c: drive to NTFS, and began loading xp. Now when xp gets to the loading the drivers part, it ALWAYS freezes. No error, no nothing. I mean always. I have restarted and tried to reinstall at least 25 times. Same thing. I have checked and rechecked BIOS, I am completely confused. Someone please help.

Regards,
Boarman
Click to expand...

Ooh - just been down that road...

Try turning APIC off in BIOS, and make sure that one and ONLY one sound card is enabled.
 
tell me you've fdisk and set the bios to spec default before attempting a reinstall, humm, switch your ram around in the slots, run a drive integrity test, just a thought...
 
when all else fails...

there should be a comp shop around that you can answer questions one on one and sometimes if they get tired of talking to you then they'll help you for a discounted price.....however the starting with a bare bones and turning off the APIC and upping the voltage and getting some more memory is a great place to start.....I'm still running ME on mine cause i dont feel like having to reload everything over to xp just yet....that time is soon comming though
 
My guess is that it's the video card. Just a hunch. I have seen this installing 98 on an old pc, it went up to driver install and froze. It was ok running in plain VGA mode but the moment the SVGA driver installed - freeze.
BTW - make sure the card is compatable with your AGPx8 slot. The socket should prevent x1/x2 cards from going in but some cards have been made that will!
 
I second the video card hunch.

When I switched from 98 to XP - I had similar problems, although XP eventually loaded. But I continued to have issues.

Until I calmly removed the ATI card and stomped it's guts out - and replaced it with a card with nVidia chipset. No problems since.
 
Hey folks, thanks for all the help.
Some updates-
I don't disagree about the video card. I had that hunch as well.
I've Fdisked three times, and defaulted the BIOS. I have not switched around my RAM.
I've removed all hardware except for video card, and upped the voltage.
Nothing has made a difference.

I haven't disabled APIC in the bios. A little help on that would be appreciated. I imagine it is very simple.

I had some friends who know more about computers than I do look at it last night. They went through many possible scenarios. In the end, we pulled the hard drive out and they took it with them to plug into one of their systems to load XP. Assuming there is no problem with the hd, we will put it back in my box with XP loaded, and go from there. I guess if the V card is the issue, then it might be more apparent once XP is successfully loaded.

Thanks again-
Boarman
 
I tell ya, I've done bare drive installs on:

OS-9 (not the mac os - unix for 680x0)
DOS
Windows 3.1
Win for Workgroups
Windows NT
OS/2
Linux ( Red Hat, Mandrake and debian)
Mac OS (7 - 9)

None of the above even came close to Win XP for being a cranky, hard to install OS.
 
woodshedder said:
Ok, I'm dumbfounded.
Mobo is Asus P4PE-x
P4 2.4
WD 80gb hd
512 mb ram
ATI video card
M-audio omni studio w/delta 66

Had computer running with win 98. Lots of hanging and freezing. Bought XP with hopes of fixing said hanging and freezing. Reformatted c: drive to NTFS, and began loading xp. Now when xp gets to the loading the drivers part, it ALWAYS freezes. No error, no nothing. I mean always. I have restarted and tried to reinstall at least 25 times. Same thing. I have checked and rechecked BIOS, I am completely confused. Someone please help.

Regards,
Boarman
Click to expand...

freezing usualy follows a ram or drive, bios issue, overclocking can mess up an install, uninstall the m-audio card and if the board has three ram slots move a stick to the far or a differrent slot for a 512 single stick...

if the system was frezzing beforre this install attempt i'd guess it's a ram issue, but that could have been a driver before causing the freezing, make sure the harddrive is set to master or slave, not cable select...

check thee manual for jumpers not set correctly etc...
 
still debating the xp switch

what are the advantages to that? i know i cant do much worse than me which is what I'm running
 
This is an excellent utility for memory testing:

http://www.memtest86.com/

Just use a bootable floppy. At least you'll be able to rule out the RAM if it is good.

We use this all the time - you'd be surprised how much bad RAM is out there (sloppy techs, static, etc.)

Good luck,
Mike
 
XP WORKs! FINALLY SUCCESSFUL INSTALL

UPDATE: XP is installed and running like a champ.

Just in case you’ve been following the thread, let me explain what happened. My friend took my hard drive and installed it in his bare-bones system. XP installed no problem there.

I then re-installed the hard drive back in my system. Of course, when I turned the computer on, Windows wouldn’t start. It said there was a problem. It gave the screen where it offers safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, etc. and normal start-up. No matter which one I chose, the computer would re-start and take me to the same screen. I tried many times.

Out of frustration, I booted from the XP CD. I chose to repair/recover a previous installation. To my surprise, it went through the whole repair and install never hanging or freezing. I’m not sure what was different, except that it seemed to be swapping many more files from the HD than from the CD. I guess that XP being previously installed, it had whatever driver it needed to complete the install this time. But I am obviously only guessing…

Anyway, M-Audio and N-tracks are running just fine. Thanks for all the help folks.
 
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