Tough nut: A7V133 mobo and NT install problem

[Guest]

Alright! The crew at Tom's is my final hope before I return to shooting in the dark.

I'm suffering from the classic "file <---> was not copied correctly" error during an NT4 install to a 1.05 A7V133 mobo, Duron 800 processor. Have ruled out the install media. Am installing to 8G drive on the VIA controller; drive is historically solid. Have mostly ruled out RAM (have tried various DIMMS; continued failure, always at same point).

Searching deja has turned up a number of hits, many of them involving the A7V133 mobo, but no definitive solutions. Overall, the error looks to be the result of a RAM, caching, or IRQ problem.

My next moves are to flash the bios to most current, strip out unnecessary boards (nic), turn off all caching in the bios, disable promise controller, and retry the install. Perhaps copy the i386 directory from the CD to HD and install from there.

Still, the fact is I'm shooting in the dark. Does anyone have a more definitive solution to this problem, and/or can anyone provide any insight into some of the more obscure bios settings that I might tweak to get this OS installed?

Thanks very much in advance!!

 

[btvillarin]

Hmm...that's strange indeed. What kind of RAM are you using? Wait, I doubt it's RAM because it's pretty reliable. Why did you rule out the installation media? Perhaps the CD-ROM is defective? Try disconnecting and reconnecting the CD-ROM drive and HD cables going from the motherboard and the CD-ROM drive and HD themselves. Make sure they're secure.

It it's not too much trouble, flash to the newest BIOS (at least 1005a, but 1007 is the newest).

In the BIOS, if you're not using the Promise controller, then yes, disable it. But, I think everything else in the BIOS should be the defaults.

Just have the following components in your computer, then try reinstalling again: motherboard, cpu, HSF, graphics card, HD, FDD, CD-ROM drive. Plug in only the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Don't pay any attention to my chickenscratch.

 

[Guest]

Thanks much for the input. I may indeed have to go slow and painful on this one, unless somebody has a solution up their sleeve.

The media I ruled out because I tried installing from four different CDs, only one of which is a self-burned backup copy; the install failed at the same spot each time. Have never had a problem with the CD drive in this box (can try installing from HD to test that one). RAM I don't think is a culprit because I have swapped in various different DIMMs with which the mobo has run stably under 98 and ME.

I've seen newsgroup posts of this error from folks installing either NT4 or 2000, but none reporting a viable workaround. It's a real booger - the worst kind of intermittent. One guy I e-mailed directly after reading an old post of his - he had two 1.04 boards and two 1.05 boards. The 1.04s had no problem; both 1.05s had a problem. He finally got W2K installed on one of the 1.05s by stripping the system down to bare bones and disabling every cache option in the bios during the text portion of the install. His solution is the only account I have found of someone actually finding a successful workaround to the "file not copied correctly" error for either NT or W2K.

 

[btvillarin]

Good luck, then. It's too bad that you're gonna have to go through all of that.

I'm hoping to get Win2K in a week, and I'll see if I get those kind of errors. I have a 1.05 rev A7V133.

What cache options were you planning on disabling??? I'm just curious about this...

Don't pay any attention to my chickenscratch.

 

[Guest]

just a thought.......is your MoBo equiped with onboard sound? If so make sure it is disabled. I had a prob installing NT4 on my K7S5A with this option enabled.
hope it helps
oh yeah........just another idea
make sure you disable 32bit disk access and HDD block mode in the BIOS.....this is known to sometimes corrupt files under NT4




K7S5A. 1.2T'Bird@266Mhz 128Mb DDR. WinNT4 ......No Problems!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by GAZ on 10/23/01 08:43 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

Regarding cache options, I actually don't know; the guy who recommended this didn't get specific.

Here's what I did to get NT installed. I flashed the bios up to 1007. The only settings that looked like cache that were left active in the new bios were the cpu cache settings. I left those alone. I hadn't seen the advice regarding 32bit disk access and block mode yet, so I didn't make any adjustments to the default settings. Pulled my NIC. Disabled the ATA100 interface. Had a 8G drive as master on IDE 1 and cdrom as master on IDE2. Copied the i386 directory to my hard drive, and did a floppyless install from the hard drive using "winnt /b".

The install STILL failed to copy setupapi.dll (this is the file that always failed in the past), but after I skipped the file, made it through the rest of the text based install OK. When the machine rebooted to begin the gui install phase, I stuck in a DOS boot floppy. Meanwhile, on another PC, I used the extract utility to extract the setupapi.dll file from the installation CD onto a floppy disk. After booting to DOS on my installation machine, I copied the file from the floppy to \winnt\system32, then rebooted to continue the install. Worked like a charm.

Other weirdness though: I applied service pack 5 from CD, and once again the process failed to copy setupapi.dll. I again used another machine to copy the file to a floppy, and upon rebooting, did the same routine as before. Worked fine.

Yet more weirdness: Copied service pack 6a executable to hard drive (once I got my nic configured), and ran the install from there. AGAIN, it barfed on setupapi.dll and one other dll file. From the same machine, I copied the two needed files onto a floppy from the location on the hard drive to which they had been extracted for install. Selected the 'skip' option for both. Then tried to copy the files via the NT interface; got 'corrupt file' errors. However, after rebooting to DOS after installation as before, I was able to successfully copy both files to \winnt\system32, and from the same floppy that gave me errors under the NT interface. Rebooted the machine; everything's fine.

This is a real puzzlement to me. Although it was a pain in the rear, I was able to get NT up and running, which was a requirement for the project I'm working on. However, I don't know what problems I might run into with a W2K install, which is coming up in short order (this machine is a test bench for various things in my 'home workshop'). If I recall correctly, W2K has some copy protection for the system dlls, and I don't know if my 'boot to dos and copy' strategy will work for that.

Still don't have any idea what's causing the problem, though. The more I read, the more I wonder if the VIA chipset isn't causing me grief. I do know that I have been absolutely unable to install a Tekram DC-390F scsi card and attach a drive to it without bluescreening.

Even though I've got NT installed (finally), I would still be very interested in any feedback anyone has to offer.

Thanks much, all!

 

[btvillarin]

That's really something to have to copy that file manually. I can't imagine the reason. Maybe when I become a Computer Engineer or something will I know the reason why...

I'm glad it "worked out".

Don't pay any attention to my chickenscratch.