Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (
More info?)
To all the generous members of this newsgroup who have responded:
Short answer:
The problem turned out to be a bad or incompatible memory module, as
well as a hard disk that for some reason would not take a Windows XP
boot record. Also, my hard disk cabling may have played a part.
It should be noted that both the memory and the hard disk came from
other much slower systems in which they worked fine.
Detail:
When I got back to work on my system the first thing I did was put
the _gray_ rather than the _black_ 40 pin connector on my hard disk. I
had read the night before in another manual that gray (closest to
motherboard) was for master and black was for slave. For years I have
always thought it was the reverse.
I then booted the install CD, and early in the file copy process I got
an "page fault" error. I had not received this error previously, just
"could not copy file" errors. But "page fault" meant memory problem I
figured.
I then put in an untried 256MB PC3200 DIMM. I restarted the install
from CD and all files copied without error, to may rapture. This was the
first time this had happened. Unfortunately, after Windows rebooted to
complete the installation, the BIOS reported "Error loading operating
system."
I then reinstalled. I blew away my 120 gig partition, created a 30 GB
one on it, let the install do full NTFS formatting, and again all
files copied over with no errors, to my redoubled rapture.
Unfortunately, the system again reported "Error loading operating
system" after windows rebooted to complete the install.
From the Recovery Console I thrashed about with fixmbr, fixboot, and
bootcfg hoping to find the right combination of these magic words.
After running fixmbr and booting back into Recovery Console, bootcfg
/rebuild said the disk had problems and to run chkdsk. Chkdsk then said
there were unrecoverable problems. Not impressed, I ran fixboot, after
which bootcfg /rebuild found my installation, and I Added it with
/fastdetect as an option. But on reboot, still got "Error loading
operating system."
I pulled the hard drive from another Windows XP machine, ran the
automatic repair from the XP install CD, and Windows XP installed
without incident.
After going through a couple cycles of Windows Update (my CD already had
SP2), I put the offending memory module back in the machine, hoping to
save a nickel. The system ran ok, until two Windows Update cycles
later, system would not boot, saying a file was missing or corrupt.
I put the good/compatible memory back in, and reinstalled without
incident. System has been surfing, emailing, and playing DVDs all day.
Thank all you guys for your replies. Anybody want this Chaintech I
bought to replace my now functional PG4E-MX?
Best,
Toney
On 2005-02-03, Michael W. Ryder <mwryder@_worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> V. Tony Jones wrote:
>
>> Thank you for the suggestion. What process did you use to copy the install CD to
>> hard disk? Did you xcopy under a working Windows install? After copying, does
>> the boot into the install the way the CD does?
>>
>
> In my case I had a working copy of Windows 2000 and used Windows
> Explorer to drag and drop the directories. From there I ran the setup
> program. You could probably do the same using a boot disk and xcopy as
> long as you made sure that all the files and directories were copied.
>
>
>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>> Toney
>>
>>
>>
On 2005-02-03, Michael W. Ryder <mwryder@_worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> V. Tony Jones wrote:
>
>> Thank you for the suggestion. What process did you use to copy the install CD to
>> hard disk? Did you xcopy under a working Windows install? After copying, does
>> the boot into the install the way the CD does?
>>
>
> In my case I had a working copy of Windows 2000 and used Windows
> Explorer to drag and drop the directories. From there I ran the setup
> program. You could probably do the same using a boot disk and xcopy as
> long as you made sure that all the files and directories were copied.
>
>
>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>> Toney
>>
>>
>>
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