This is driving me batty. I’ve done a fresh install of XP to another drive but I’d really like to get my old desktop back.
Here’s the situation. I went and upgraded all the major components of my system to build a nice moderately kick-arse rig: Asus A8N32-Deluxe SLI-16X (from Asus A7N8X), BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC 256MB (from Albatron Trinity 6800LE 128MB), Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (from Sempron 2700+) and 2x1GB matched Corsair DDR400 sticks (from 2x512MB DDR400 Kingston sticks), plus a nice new case (Thermaltake Shark).
The assembly went well except for me losing the 12V plug for twenty or so minutes (I know. It’s attached to the PSU. Don’t ask.) Then I embarked on a WinXP Pro SP2 repair install, figuring it’d reset all my device drivers and I’d be back in business in about 45 minutes.
Nuh-uh, sez Windows, for upon getting about 2/3rds the way through device detection/installation, it spontaneously reboots. Then it restarts the install, gets about 2/3rds the way through device detection/installation, and spontaneously reboots. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To try and get past this I fiddled with a few things:
I disabled on-board sound on the motherboard in the event it was conflicting with my Santa Cruz. No luck.
I removed all USB devices except keyboard and mouse, and removed all cards except video, in case the repair install didn’t like one of those. Nope.
I tried restarting the entire repair install process in case it mucked up the first time. Nada.
I tried running with first one stick of RAM, then the other, in case I got a bum stick. Bubkis.
No matter what I did, it did precisely the same thing over and over. Resume install, install 2/3rds of the devices, reboot.
Is there anything else I can try to get this going? It’s obvious that it’s finding something it can’t deal with as compared to the old setup I’m trying to “repair” (which strikes me as odd as it shouldn’t give a crap what the old setup consists of – and since a fresh install worked just fine it obviously has no problem with any of my new gear, it should just steamroll all the old stuff and replace it with new stuff.)
C’mon, Dopers. Help me resurrect my nice shiny old desktop! I miss it terribly and I’m itchin’ to max out my settings in Half Life 2.
When this happened to me, I had bad memory sticks. You might try booting to memtest to make absolutely sure that that’s not the problem. You also might try using onboard video, just in case that’s the problem. Also, check the jumpers on all your drives. If you were using CSS and switched around EIDE cables, you might be having problems with that.
If none of that works, make sure it isn’t overheating, and that the PSU is adequate.
Unless it’s a RAM or MB grounding issue, it’s likely (if it’s neither of the other scenarios) some loading component of the previous driver set is preventing re-initialization. If might be useful to get a new hard drive and install the OS from scratch on that unit then slave the old drive to the new master.
Overheating is a possibility - if it’s getting to a part of the install that is suddenly processor-intensive, the temperature can spike and this can result in a reboot. Are all the fans spinning OK?
I’d also agree that memory could be an issue; try reseating the RAM; if that doesn’t work and if there’s more than one stick of RAM, try removing one and retrying the repair install (then the other, if that still fails).
It’s definitely not a heat issue. Everything is housed in a Thermaltake Shark case with side honeycomb grille (plenty of open space to vent heat), a front-mounted 120mm intake fan, a rear-mounted 120mm exhaust fan, and an 80mm CPU fan with large heat sink. This is all on top of the A8N32-Deluxe’s copper heat piping system that extends from the south to north bridge and then north to a copper heat sink that I also attached the optional exhaust fan to. Ambient case temp during the installation process is <20c. All fans are brand new. (The two 120mm fans came with the case, the CPU fan came with the new CPU, and the heat pipe fan came with the new motherboard; I can’t reuse my old fans 'cos there are no 80mm mounts)
It’s not bad RAM either. The RAM sticks are brand new, a matched set of Corsair TWINX2048-3200 1-gig modules. The system runs fine and stable on the temporary Window install I did on a different drive on a separate physical unit.
The hard drives I’m using are the same and the type hasn’t changed. It’s a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 ATA133/16M Cache 7200RPM 250GB drive. All I’m doing is a repair install to the same partition on the same drive.
It’s not a grounding issue. The board is mounted on non-conductive risers.
I can’t see it being an old driver issue – isn’t that what a repair install is supposed to do? Redetect your hardware and install new drivers without regard to what was there previously?
And before it’s suggested it’s not a lack of power. I’m currently running on a Nikao IcePower 450W 12V-compliant PSU. It’s less than a year old and has been running stable in all this time.
YMMV but any serious hardware changes, especially a mobo, I would always do a clean install rather than futzing around with patching up an existing one.
You could have a mobo problem too. Could be any number of bad components on the board that could crash an install/repair during the detect phase.
If that were the case, a new install should logically bung it up too – and it didn’t. I had no trouble at all installing a new copy of XP on a different partition. Like I said, all components are new, so slim chance of a bum component, and it’s all high end material to boot.
Well, if I can’t get the repair install to work then I guess the silver lining would be that it’s an excuse to get a nice SATA drive. Still, it’d be nice if I could complete the repair install and ghost it over to a new SATA drive anyway.
It can’t do anyting with accessory and perpheral drivers that are munged up and some of these are low level enough (video-audio-storage drivers etc) thay can stop loading cold.
You aren’t running an SATA hard disk by any chance are you? The earlier versions of the XP OS, until those shipping this past year, did not have device drivers for SATA drives and installs would sometimes cycle (like yours is doing) until the driver was loaded via CD or thumb drive.
This used to work on Windows 95/95, but not XP. Windows Xp will automatically recognise new hardware and install the appropriate drivers except when a motherboard with a different chipset is installed. Your old motherboard had nForce 2 chipset while the new one has nForce 4. Big difference.
Maybe there’s some way to manually substitute the drivers and maybe edit the registry and make it work. But the best way is to format the drive and make a clean installation of Windows.
XP repair install has it’s limits, and if there are motherboard or peripheral specific drivers referenced in the registry that were not included on the XP OS install CD that are munged up or misassigned, a repair install will not repair or replace these. A clean install is usually the best way to go and contrary to popular belief a repair install is not (at all) a true clean install.
Oh well – I guess I’ve become accustomed to the idea that I might have to, since I’ve been using this temporary install for a couple of days now.
Good excuse to get me a new hard drive I guess – got a line on a 500GB SATA/300 so I think I’ll just get that, install clean and have done with it.
On a mostly unrelated space, how does mixing SATA and ATA drives work? What gets priority in terms of boot sequence? I’d like to keep the two ATA drives I have in there now so I can copy stuff off of them on to the new SATA drive, but naturally I want to boot exclusively from the SATA drive. I haven’t really played around with the million-and-a-half options in the BIOS on this new motherboard so I don’t know if it offers SATA-first boot priority.
