[joemawlma]

I have this old POS 1.1 GHz Gateway and it's got a bunch of mini parts because the case was small. So for a few bucks I bought an old broken 70's receiver (with wood side paneling, oh yeah) and gutted it so I could put the computer in there. The MB is grounded. I wired the power button for the computer to the receiver power switch and that worked fine. And I hooked up the lights in the front of the receiver so they turn on with the computer and that works fine. One side of the wood paneling hinges down and the CD-rom and Floppy drive are behind it. There's even USB plugs in the front of the receiver where some oval shaped buttons used to be. It's actually pretty sweet so far.

And it was working great at first. I installed XP on it and i updated windows and added a bunch of codecs and stuff and restarted a few times without problems. Then out of nowhere without any hardware tinkering (at least to my knowledge), XP wouldn't load anymore. It would just lock up every time. I almost want to say that restarting it didn't screw it up but when I turned off the power and then back on it started having problems (but that might not be accurate).

So I couldn't figure out what to do and started replacing random stuff like memory and harddrives. The memory and harddrives and all that kinda crap work just fine in other computers but not this one anymore. I even updated the BIOS. Nothing was working.

So then I decided to just reformat and reinstall XP. Now here's where I stand. When trying to install XP I end up getting to the "SETUP IS STARTING WINDOWS" portion of the installation at the beginning, but every time it just locks up here. EVERY TIME. It's really annoying and I have no idea what to do now. I don't have any disks for the motherboard or anything but I am trying to get MSI or GATEWAY to respond to an email with something special maybe.

I do think a possible problem could be with the computer not wanting to read harddrive's content all of the sudden. I got DOS to load from a floppy and the computer acknowledges the HD is there (in BIOS settings too) and how big it is, but the contents of it cannot be read at all. It just says "Disk read fail" or something. And remember, the HD works find in other computers. But even if this is what the problem is, I have absolutely no clue how or if I can fix that.

The BIOS settings are really crappy. There's hardly any options to tinker with. Anyone got any suggestions? I'd love to get this thing working again.

Gateway 1.1GHz Intel Celeron
256MB RAM
MSI Motherboard Model MS-6312
30-GIG Maxtor
Radeon 9200SE
90W Mini Power Supply
Some crappy Lan card
Etc...

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If you are getting to the point where it says starting windows with the grey boxes at the bottom of the screen, not the colorful WindowsXP logo, hit F8 and see if you can go into Safe Mode. If that is sucessful I'd venture a guess and say that one of the drivers that was installed is either corrupt or not the right driver for the device. From Safe Mode you can try the System Restore tool by going to START > RUN and entering %SystemRoot%\System32\restore\rstrui.exe and pressing OK. Select an earlier date to roll it back to.

Thats what I would try but probably not right.

[Alopeke]

If you are getting to the point where it says starting windows with the grey boxes at the bottom of the screen, not the colorful WindowsXP logo, hit F8 and see if you can go into Safe Mode. If that is sucessful I'd venture a guess and say that one of the drivers that was installed is either corrupt or not the right driver for the device. From Safe Mode you can try the System Restore tool by going to START > RUN and entering %SystemRoot%\System32\restore\rstrui.exe and pressing OK. Select an earlier date to roll it back to.

Thats what I would try but probably not right.

[joemawlma]

I tried that with no luck. And as of right now I have wiped the HD with Fdisk and don't have an OS at all installed. I am currently stumped at the XP installation where it says "Setup is starting windows.." at the bottom on a blue screen.

No idea why it's freezing here. It doesn't make sense. I would assume it's just because of it being a gateway and some parts not being compatible with eachother, but I'm still open to suggestions. Please help, ANYONE!!!

[xigxag]

Make sure that your XP disc is free of scratches. I once spent hours trying to figure out why my install kept getting stuck, finally figured out the XP disc was scratched. I was getting stuck at the same point of install.

[Rockster2U]

Stepping beyond pure speculation, it sure sounds like a motherboard problem to me. I've seen a couple of Gigabyte boards behave this way - not toast, but on their way out and impossible to load an OS.