I’m trying to re-upgrade (which is where I may have gone wrong, but anyway…) windows XP pro on my circa 2000 Dell Dimension 8100. When it got to the ‘installing devices’ bullet it would hang. I yanked all my USB stuff and tried again. Still hanging. I yanked the modem that’s been giving me a headache. Still hanging. I tried rebooting in safe mode and got the safe mode things in the corners and a cursor, but no desktop to work with. I started up again NOT in safe mode the setup resumed but now I just have a blank screen and a cursor. I feel like I’m killing the damn thing. What’s going on? I want a do-over.
Get into your BIOS (Setup) screen and check the time and date, make sure that’s correct.
When I worked for a laptop manufacturer, we had a guy bring in a laptop that exhibited the exact thing you’re talking about, his internal clock was set to Feb 14, 2098. Resetting the date correctly allowed it to boot right up.
Apparently this is a side effect of the Win2k38 bug, the “next” end of the computer world scenario, where on Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 the internal clock of 32-bit systems will overflow.
Check it out.
Go into the BIOS and defeat any serial ports or parallel ports. If any video options can be set, set them to the lowest level default resolution mode.
The date’s OK, I set the parallel and serial ports to off and tried different video settings (AGP or Auto) but nothing’s changed. I’ll resume this in the morning. Thanks for the ideas.
I’m thinking it may be time to call Microsoft tech support. Even if y ou have to ante up ~35 bucks an hour, it is sometimes money well spent.
I don’t know if they’d charge you or not, and I’ve heard stories about how helpful they were that range from really good to pretty bad. But it’s just something to think about if you are still getting nowhere.
I’m also assuming you aren’t doing somethng like trying to install an illegal copy of XP or something…
I read somewhere that Dell customises their PCs to such an extent that you need their version of XP to upgrade. Now I’m definitely not an expert on this so if I’m talking nonsense I’d appreciate being put straight.
I’d like to know that too. I have an unused legal copy of XP Pro. I was going to buy a laptop w/XP Home on it and just upgrade it, but if you can’t…
Put the modem back in
Via the BIOS set your CD to be bootable and to be the first thing read in boot up sequence
Remove any RAM memory modules you have installed beyond what the unit came with
Take out all PC cards (if installed)
See if the BIOS is assigning fixed IRQs for any peripheral devices and if there are any IRQ or memory assignment option settings for the on board modem you removed.
Set USB mode to “legacy” if the option exists
Set if your BIOS has a “reset all parameters to factory specifications” type option and apply it
Restart in safe mode and let it chew on the start up for up to 10 minutes
If it’s still hanging it sounds like a full format re-install may be your best bet. If your critical data is not backed up &/or irreplaceable you will need to slave the hard drive to a desktop machine (2.5 > 3.5 IDE converters are around $ 10- $15) and pull off what you need before re-formatting
update - I pulled everything that wasn’t OEM - and put the OEM modem back in and booted from the CD. So far, so good!
It lives! But man, I have a lot of stuff to hook up and reconfigure. Thanks, all, and especially astro!