[SpaceCowboy706]

I am not a hardware Guru, so I need some help...

A friend gave me a fairly new gateway that had suffered an electrical surge and ceased to work. I was able to get it working again by replacing it's hard drive with another HD from my wifes older PC (thus giving her a newer PC). It is now up and working fine except for one thing... When the PC boots up I get the Windows XP boot screen, then it goes to a black screen and sits for about 45 seconds to a minute.... then log's on and works fine.

I never had this problem when this hard drive was in the older machine...

I have no clue why it is doing this and any help I can get (so my wife will leave me alone about it) would be greatly appreciated.

PS.
Not sure if this relates to my problem or not but, This is the only device on the PC that shows driver problems.

I had to Disable it, so I wouldn't get the Found Hardware Wizard every time the PC starts up. I originally had two of these exact same devices show up and after loading the drivers for the sound card, one of them went away. This one keeps coming back regardless if I uninstall it, or let it finish the hardware wizard and fail. The only way to keep from having to deal with it is to disable it. Again, I'm not sure if this is the cause or not, but was the only thing I could find.



PC Info & Changes I made:

Model - Gateway 510

OS - Windows XP Pro SP2

Harddrive - Replaced Damaged manufacturer HD with Seagate ST3160023A

Linksys WMP54G Wireless PCI Network Card (Hardware I added to PCI slot - currently disabled - Just have it in case I need to go wireless for whatever reason)

Microsoft TV/Video card (removed it - since I never used it)

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Hi ya

Can you tell me...

1) When you installed the hard drive into the gateway, did you format the drive & perform fresh installation of Windows or not?

2) Does this system have 2 sound cards by any chance? e.g one integrated card & one PCI card.

[Samm]

Hi ya

Can you tell me...

1) When you installed the hard drive into the gateway, did you format the drive & perform fresh installation of Windows or not?

2) Does this system have 2 sound cards by any chance? e.g one integrated card & one PCI card.

[SpaceCowboy706]

Answer to Question 1 -

It's you again Sam, You helped me to get the hard drive going about a week or so ago... Formatting is not an option, as I have lots of data on here and I do not wish to lose it.. or have to go through the trouble of trying to back it all up... so that should answer question 1 Last week we was able to get it working by messing with the registry.

Answer to Question 2 -

I'll be a bearded ugly a$$ gnome... ... there is an onboard sound card... I missed that... And its soddered in... with no manufacturer spec markings of any kind... how do u suggest we get the drivers for it, not knowing what the make and model is????

[Samm]

I am right in thinking that you have a PCI sound card AS WELL as the onboard then?
If so, then you have a few possible options :

1. Remove the PCI sound card & use the onboard one. You can probably figure out which make it is by looking very closing at the chips on the motherboard. There should be a chip (usually very small) with the sound card manufacturers name & a model number on.

2. OR use the PCI card & disable the onboard sound card in the bios.

[SpaceCowboy706]

The onboard sound card looks cheap and crappy, so i just disabled it in the Bios.... Made the question mark go away in the device manager (as expected)... but it didn't help the boot hang time at all.... any more ideas???

[Samm]

Yeah. Try physically removing the PCI sound card as well & see if it boots up any quicker

[SpaceCowboy706]

Removed the PCI Sound card.. leaving me with no sound... since the onboard is turned off... No differrence

[jrm20]

Answer to Question 1 -

It's you again Sam, You helped me to get the hard drive going about a week or so ago... Formatting is not an option, as I have lots of data on here and I do not wish to lose it.. or have to go through the trouble of trying to back it all up... so that should answer question 1 Last week we was able to get it working by messing with the registry.

Answer to Question 2 -

I'll be a bearded ugly a$$ gnome... ... there is an onboard sound card... I missed that... And its soddered in... with no manufacturer spec markings of any kind... how do u suggest we get the drivers for it, not knowing what the make and model is????

I know you said that you dont want to worry about backing up the data but you need to try backing up the data that you need or either transfer it to another harddrive somehow then put a fresh install of windows on that pc.

I am pretty certain that is the problem as it is using the old drivers from the previous computer that the harddrive was last installed on..

The harddrive needs completely wiped and reformatted with ntfs.

If you dont want to worry about reformatting then leave the pc as is, the pc works fine does it not?

[SpaceCowboy706]

Just got done doing the Repair XP function that is selected from the install XP Menu when you boot from the XP Disk... It went through and took about 30 minutes and it still didn't make a difference... so I dont think Reformatting and reloading will change this problem either.

As I said earlier I have too many programs that I dont think I could ever get again... and too much data (about 100GB) spread out all over the place... So I guess closing this thread is our only option. Thanks for your help guys and gals.

[Samm]

I am inclined to agree with jrm20 on this one. However there is one more thing you could try, assuming that this problem is driver related.

I recommend that you create a system restore point before attempting the following procedure.

Firstly, leave the PCI sound card out & remove any other PCI cards you may have. Leave the onboard sound disabled. Remove all USB devices (except USB keyboard/mouse if you're using them)

Boot up in safe mode then go into device manager. Expand each of the branches in device manager & delete any duplicated entries (except for IRQ holders for PCI steering). For instance, if there are 2 network cards listed (of the same make/model), then delete both entries. Safe mode will often show up ghost devices that normal mode won't.

Also delete any devices which are from the old computer. EG if the old system had an ATI video card & the current system has an Nvidia card, delete the ATI entry.

Also check on the chipset used in the old & in the current system. i.e if the old machine had an SIS chipset & the current machine has a VIA chipset, then make sure you remove all entries pertaining to the SIS one.

Make sure as well that you delete ALL entries related to either of the two sound cards & to any other PCI devices you removed or onboard devices that you disabled.

Reboot normally & let windows redect & reinstall any new hardware it discovers. Once that is done, you can then re-install the sound card & other devices. Do these one at a time though -i.e re-enable in the bios or add the card back in & let Windows install the driver. Shutdown & repeat for the next device

[SpaceCowboy706]

Will give it a go this weekend sam... thanks... Only have time to do followup's on G2G users during the work week and no time to work on my own problems