This seems illogical, but it’s what happened to me.
[somewhat unnecesary rant]
I formatted my drives and attempted to reinstall windows. Didn’t work. Lots. I had a different drive configuration than the last time I installed, so I thought that was it. And with dos copying mode, each install attempt took about an hour. And I tried about 12 different combinations and setups. Add in all the IDE cable switching, when everything is cramped and tangled, and all of the BIOS settings switching, I spent about 20 hours trying to get win2k to install. No luck.
[/somewhat unnecesary rant]
End result: In the end, I thought “Well, the only thing that’s different now that I didn’t try switching is the video card, but that shouldn’t make any difference…”, so I swapped out my video card (gf4 ti4200) for my old card (gf2 mx), and whalla, the install works.
What was happening was this: I’d run winnt (also tried winnt32 before I formatted, same results), and it would copy all of the files it would need to install windows.
I’d reboot, and it would say “Windows is now detecting your hardware setup”… Then form the text-mode screen with the blue background and white foreground… It would ask if I needed any SCSI or RAID drivers installed - and I do have a raid controller, so I’d install them from disk.
Now, if I installed them from the disk, this is what happened: It would read the files from the disk, do a few things that would go by too fast to read, and then say “Now starting windows 2000…” or somesuch in the ‘status’ bar. It would sit there for about 6 seconds with no hard drive activity or anything - and then my keyboard lights would go all on (capslock, numlock, etc.) and then turn completely off - as if I were rebooting. Then 3-4 seconds later, my hard drive would read for about 4 seconds, my cdrom would spin up, and then my monitor would turn off (DPMS - power saving - mode). And then nothing - no activity, and a monitor with no feed.
If I didn’t install them from the disk (just skipped the RAID driver sequence altogether), it would do the same thing with the keyboard lights, but then would turn red (text mode red where the blue background was), and hang.
None of that makes sense to me, but apparently the video card was causing it, because when I replaced the video card, it functioned normally - and went past that point in the install normally.
After installed, I plugged the new video card back in, and everything works fine.
Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?
Btw - it’s specifically limited to win2k, win ME works fine (but who wants to use that?), and it’s not a damaged cd - I tried a win2k server cd I have (free trial period with MS press books) and the same thing happened.