Unable to upgrade to WinXp after replacing RAM, video card, hard drive etc

Factual Questions
1

Long computer problem, I’m a bit of a newbie, I don’t know hardware very well, I hope someone here can help me!

I had a 40GB harddrive which was physically damaged (it got bumped, of the pins bent), I took it to a technician to have it repaired or a new harddrive installed. The tech installed an 80GB drive & fixed the 40. He told me I could get anything I wanted of the 40, but not to use it because it would break again.
I installed windows 98 on the new hard drive, then upgraded to windows xp, and then transferred over most of my folders. I couldn’t get everything, so I hooked up the 40 & got the rest of what I needed burned to a cd. At this point my brother who had been helping me decided to install some more RAM in the computer, I had 128MB, he took that out & put two 256 sticks of SD RAM from a computer he didn’t use anymore (power supply fried on it), he also installed a NIC.
I tried booting up with the old harddrive, and it froze after it reached the desktop. We tried switching to the new harddrive, and at this point we lost the video. The video card was the oldest part of the computer, 6 years old, so I replaced it, I had been meaning to anyway. The new videao card worked, but the system still wouldn’t boot with the new harddrive. He reformated it & installed Windows 98 (so I could upgrade to xp). The computer seemed to work fine with 98, it didn’t freeze once. Andthe upgrade to xp went fine it seemed until it did the final restart and tried to boot in xp, then it froze during the boot up.
My brother gave up at this point, so I tried reformatting & installing win 98 again, this was 2 days ago & it has been working fine since. But I miss my xp!

Does anyone have any ideas? Could it be something with the RAM (I am trying to find the 128 ram to reinsert it, but I think my brother took it with him)? I know I should take it to a technician, but I have run out of money :frowning:

2

I assume you tried to boot in safe mode in XP? No go?

It could be that your memory is “walking wounded” from static or perhaps from the previous PC power supply blowing.

Check out Memtest86 and scroll down to “ISO images suitable for creating a bootable Memtest86 CDROM”. Download the ISO image and use a CD burning software like Nero or EZCD Creator to burn the image. If you need help burning an ISO, just search your helpfiles or post here again.

Anyways, this image will create a bootable CD which you can use to test your memory. Boot from the CD, choose all the tests and let it run overnight or at least 2 passes if you’re pressed for time.

3

If you don’t mind going through another reformat and reload, you can try loading XP without loading 98 first.

Usually, an XP upgrade disk will allow you to load on a cleanly formatted drive, but during the install it will ask for your 98 cd. Put it in long enough for the XP install to verify it exists, and then it will prompt you to put the XP cd back in and will continue the install.

It’s possible that a clean install of XP will work, where an upgrade from 98 won’t.

But frankly, I’d still bet on some flaky hardware, such as memory. Or maybe something not fully compatible, such as motherboard or BIOS.

Good Luck!

4

Anonymous Coward is correct. Your memory has errors that only XP in full mode can detect (and stumble over). Win 98 would not utilize anywhere near the entire 256 megs RAM space so the memory did not use or stress the RAM. XP in full mode post install can use the entire RAM space and that’s when problems will crop up if they exist. The RAM most likely needs to be replaced.