[Celebrine]

If I told you the entire history of my computer and it's problems, I'd have to write a book, so we'll pick up a few months ago when we switched most of my hardware and my CPU into a different case with a different motherboard. All the old problems seemed to be solved and the only issue seemed to be that now my system was schitzy if I ran Win2k but stable if I ran WinME. So, I'm running Windows ME.

Everything was great for a couple months and then one day I came home and found my husband finishing up a system restore on my computer. One of the kids had been playing a video game and a Windows Protection Error had occurred and I didn't even ask what had ensued, but the system restore seemed to have fixed it.

Everything was great again for a couple more months until last night and both my husband and I are at a loss as to what to do to try to recover my system.

My son was playing a video game and the computer locked up. I manually shut it down and restarted it but instead of loading Windows it said it couldn't find the boot record. I restarted it again. After a couple more 'No Boot Record's, I noticed that on the initial start-up screen it said 'Pri Master - Not Found.' Crap, it's not seeing the hard drive!
So, I went into BIOS and easy as pie it refound the hard drive. I saved and exited, and got to the 'Improper Shutdown Detected' Scandisk run, where it froze partway through.
Restarted again and got the No Boot Record, went back into BIOS, showed it the hard drive, froze on the Scandisk, restarted, No Boot Record, BIOS, etc. Twice I managed to actually load Windows and login and get to my desktop. The first time it even successfully loaded everything and was usable, but it had loaded VEEEEEERRRRRRYYYYY slowly and I didn't trust it to be stable so i stupidly rerstarted it again and was unable to get back in successfully again. I kept trying a few more times but realized that it was now consistently seeing the hard drive but still not getting anywhere.

Everytime I restarted it dumped me to the 'Windows failed to load last time' screen with 4 options.
If I tried to go into Safe Mode, it restarted itself.
If I tried to start in Normal Mode, it froze on the title screen.
If I tried to start with Step by Step Confirmation, it got to msmouse.vdx and whether I entered Y or N it crashed. We tried the registry solutions we found when googling this file, but to no avail.
Mixed in with all those crashes it sometimes showed me a Windows Protection Error instead of simply restarting. One of those Windows Protection Errors pointed a finger at Vcache (another virtual driver, like msmouse.vdx).

In desperation I told my husband to go ahead and wipe the System partition and reinstall Windows.
It seems that the C drive is now wiped, but when we try to install Windows it freezes while loading the setup files!!!!!!!!

We are now at a total loss. Wiping and reinstalling Windows has always been a successful last resort option in the past and we have no idea what to do next.

Any suggestions??

Edited by Celebrine, 14 November 2005 - 02:13 PM.

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Looks like a problem with the hard drive, because as you say wipe and reinstall is always the last resort.

If you have bad sectors on the drive that Windows hasn't marked as being unavailable for use (usually because Windows doesn't work properly in the first place so it can't mark any bad sectors, a catch 22 situation you will notice), and Windows setup then puts its files on one of the unmarked bad sectors, then it will complain endlessly and do strange things.

Hard Drives are available from all good computer shops.

[Neil Jones]

Looks like a problem with the hard drive, because as you say wipe and reinstall is always the last resort.

If you have bad sectors on the drive that Windows hasn't marked as being unavailable for use (usually because Windows doesn't work properly in the first place so it can't mark any bad sectors, a catch 22 situation you will notice), and Windows setup then puts its files on one of the unmarked bad sectors, then it will complain endlessly and do strange things.

Hard Drives are available from all good computer shops.

[Celebrine]

I swapped hard drives, partitioned and formatted, but it is still not making it past 'Copying the files needed to setup Windows'
I put a call in to see if I can borrow Windows CDs to see if maybe the problem is with my CD.

Edited by Celebrine, 14 November 2005 - 05:43 PM.

[Celebrine]

I pulled out my Win2k upgrade CD to see if it would let me install that. It was copying the setup files and then went to an error mesage that said that my BIOS is not fully ACPI compliant.

[loxs]

From windowsitpro;
ACPI-Compliant BIOS:
If there's one thing you have to watch when you install Win2K, it's the BIOS. A computer's OS uses the BIOS to communicate with its hardware. An older BIOS can cause boot errors and crashes with Win2K. Newer systems use an Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)-compliant BIOS. ACPI lets you control individual devices. The ACPI standard OnNow, for example, lets you start a PC by touching a key on the keyboard.

If you swapped hard drives and it still doesn't like windowsME, It's likely to be either bad memory or a motherboard issue ....or possibly a bad cd......I fixed a problem similiar to yours by replacing the heatsink and fan.

loxs

Edited by loxs, 15 November 2005 - 01:41 AM.