[Need Patience]

I recently upgraded my system and after about 1 week XP started to freeze and occasionaly crash. Several days ago XP failed to boot from the HDD, either in Safe Mode or other settings.

Rightly or wrongly I thought the best course of action was to re-install windows, however I get as far as teh blue screen where you press enter to install XP.

After this screen I get a blue screen with the following detail at the bottom of the screen:

Examining 238473MB Disk 0 at ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi

The whole thing just seems to freeze on this screen, i have left it for several hours and nothing moves.

I have 2 identical 250GB hard drives connected on a SATA, and 2 DVD drives connected on a PATA. In the BIOS the DVD drives are listed as ID 0 master and ID 0 slave. Is windows trying to look at these or am i getting confused?

What, if anything, is going wrong.

Please help.

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Hello,
Not quite sure what's going on. As for the IDE designation it depends on the motherboard/bios how it lists IDE devices. The best thing you can do is go into bios and set everything back to Default Settings, save and exit the bios, and then try installing Windows again.

[makai]

Hello,
Not quite sure what's going on. As for the IDE designation it depends on the motherboard/bios how it lists IDE devices. The best thing you can do is go into bios and set everything back to Default Settings, save and exit the bios, and then try installing Windows again.

[Topaz]

Just a side issue, you have totally Formatted the Drive Windows XP was installed on ?

You haven't changed the configuration of your drives, HDD, or DVD since trying re-install of Win XP ?

It is odd with same config (Hardware) that this would occur, unless some other factor has not been stated, or noted, which is why I asked about Formatting the Drive which held the System, Windows XP.

[happyrock]

what do you mean by...

I recently upgraded my system and after about 1 week XP started to freeze and occasionaly crash.

did you add new hardware or what...

[Need Patience]

Hi there.

I upgraded with the following:

Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4p MOBO
AMD Phenom II x4 955
XFX HD 4870 1Gb DDR5 Graphics Card
Kingston HyperX 12800 Ram (2 x 2GB)


I suppose you could say it is nearly a new machine.

I have not formatted the HDD as I was looking to perform a repair and save all of the data that was already on there.

I have made some progress since the last post.

On the assumption that the PATA connections were confusing matters I replaced the optical drives with SATA connection drives, however as the PSU did not have enough SATA power connectors I had to use a SATA power connector from the 2nd hard drive.

This meant that the set up now has 1 HDD and 1 optical drive, both connected on a SATA connection.

I have now managed to get past the last sticking point and indeed XP has been installing, it has now moved through most of the installation and I currently have the black XP screen which just states 'please wait', however it has been on this screen for at least 20 mins (which seems to me to be a long time), I will just sit it out a little longer.

Not sure what helped to move things along, whether it was the optical drives being on a SATA (and therefore configured to be subordinate to the HDD on the BIOS), or whether it was only having 1 HDD connected.

Still not convinced I have it all sorted yet.

[happyrock]

you may have been able to repair xp after swapping all those parts and reactivate it...might well be over the limit though...in which case you will have to replace the OS as its married to the hardware ( HD...optical drive...mobo...chipset and NIC among others) and if you change enough parts your copy of xp will be no good...if/when you do get it installed and you try to activate it you may have to call MS and explain what you did and see if they will give you a new key...its a toss up if they will with the parts you changed...

[Need Patience]

Update...

All sorted.

I had to reactive windows when I did the upgrades so didnt have a problem on this.

The install froze on the black screen as I mentioned previously so I took a chance and reset the computer. Low and behold Windows has booted up first time and booted up several times since.

I have also managed to get my hands on a P4 to SATA power cable and hook up the additional (original) hardware.

Right now I am doing a back-up from the main HDD to the 2nd HDD and all working perfect.

Thanks for all the advice.

Phil

[happyrock]

your welcome...and thanks for letting us know...