Need help, have no idea WTF happened.

[4745454b]

I was fixing my old gamer, the one I gave to my wife about 2 days ago. S754 Sempron, 1gb of ram (G.Skill and mushkin), 20Gb + 120GB hdd, 9700pro Video card, Asus K8N-E deluxe. (NF3 250). Didn't bother deleting her old OS on the 20GB drive. Just ran the install over it so that it worked. It did, but it was buggy as sh!t. She couldn't run yahoo messenger, so as a test, I tried installing windows 2000 on the 120GB. Yahoo pager had several problems running on this install too, but it worked fine as soon as I installed all the updates for win2000. (requires .net?) It still had the problem of not being able to download things from IE, so I thought I'd try a PCI NIC, instead of the NF3's onboard.
This is where everything went to hell. After shutting the PC off, I plugged in the ancient 3com 3c905, and powered it back up. When you boot, instead of being asked which windows to load, it gives you the error message "error loading opterating system." Both harddrives are found in the bios. I can't use an old bootdisk, as the A drive in this system died awhile ago. (I'll look in the parts bin) I'm download Kinoppix tonight. I also tried to boot from the windows cd, but it now hangs on starting windows2000.
I fail to understand why trying to install this NIC would cause this. I don't think its the dual boot, many people have done this, and I rebooted several times before adding the card. The power was off, and I'm stumped. Please shout out ideas.

 

[f1nal_0men]

If you can, run chkdsk and make sure the harddrives themselves aren't toast. It sounds like The harddrives are no good, thats why you are getting so many problems with programs not working. Also, it just seemed to be a coincedince that the NIC card was installed at the time your system became unbootable. So give chkdsk a try, this is just a thought.

 

[4745454b]

I assume there is a way to do this with knoppix? I'm not 100% sure I've got a working A drive anymore. I wonder why the windows CD stopped loading too. Tomorrow I'll try linux and remove everything that doesn't need to be there.

 

[SidVicious]

Have you tried booting without the NIC ?

Check what the boot order is in BIOS (it could be trying to boot from the NIC), if you fail to see any progress, strip that 'rig down to the bare essentials and a single HDD, if that still does'nt work, clear the CMOS.

BTW, have you bothered installing the chipset drivers after your first OS install ?

 

[PhoenixKnight]

The problem may be your hard drives, or it may be some other piece of hardware. I suggest downloading getting a bootable "Live" CD, which is basically an OS that boots off a CD or DVD, and see if that has any problems running. You can download some "Live" versions of Linux and various sites.

Does your computer freeze or crash, or do programs just act weird? Has the computer frozen during Windows installation? I've recently had strange crashes on one of my computers and general weirdness with programs in Windows. It turned out to be a bad power supply, which ended up frying a motherboard. Try swapping the PSU out for a different one, reinstall Windows, and see if that helps. If not, you're going to have to swap out components one at a time until you can identify the problem.

And just to make sure, the PSU has enough wattage to fully power the system, right?

 

[damfoose]

Have you tried moving the nic to another slot then tried booting it may be an IRQ prob, Also as has already been pointed out put boot from network as last in boot order.

 

[4745454b]

I'm not sure I've mentioned this... As soon as the computer failed to boot, I removed the NIC. When that failed, I unpluged the seconary IDE cable. (DVD burner and 120GB drive) That failed also. I then reset the bios, which also failed. I need to come up with some way to look at the drives. The knoppix disk failed to download over night. I have about another 3 hours, I only got 73% of it. (BTW, I also removed the g.Skill stick of ram as it was also new. When I used the computer, I only had the mushkin.) If any smarter nerd in a cube has a better idea, keep them coming while I'm at work today.

 

[HYST3R]

well if your computer will post,

there is a program called ACRONIS which will allow you to check both hard drives for errors/repair them if necessary. it can be downloaded using the same "software" that your downloading knoppix on. its very easy to use and will allow you to fix jsut about any problem there is with HDD's. its also a bootable cd, just DL the ISO rip it to cd, and go.

other than that,

if its not posting, then you need to strip down that pc to one HDD (which ever one will work) 1 stick of ram, and one optical drive.

clear the cmos either by,

1. tunring off the power switch on the back of the case, unplugging the power cord, taking out the cmos battery, and pressing the power button a few times (to clear out remaing current) making sure to wait atleast 30 secs before replacing the battery.

2. clearing the cmos using the cmos jumpers on the mobo.

then if and when you get it to post, you should prob set up the larger HDD as the master and use the 20gb drive as a slave.

hope something in there helps.

 

[mandark357]

Try loading the default fail safe setup for the BIOS and reboot from there. Its possible that the old Nic card caused a conflict and you are now seeing the after effects.

You may also want to try either drive on a separate system(by themselves) and see if they are actually working. If the HD's bootup fine in a different system then that narrows it down to either a BIOS setting or a bad Mobo. Good luck.

 

[BaronMatrix]

I was fixing my old gamer, the one I gave to my wife about 2 days ago. S754 Sempron, 1gb of ram (G.Skill and mushkin), 20Gb + 120GB hdd, 9700pro Video card, Asus K8N-E deluxe. (NF3 250). Didn't bother deleting her old OS on the 20GB drive. Just ran the install over it so that it worked. It did, but it was buggy as sh!t. She couldn't run yahoo messenger, so as a test, I tried installing windows 2000 on the 120GB. Yahoo pager had several problems running on this install too, but it worked fine as soon as I installed all the updates for win2000. (requires .net?) It still had the problem of not being able to download things from IE, so I thought I'd try a PCI NIC, instead of the NF3's onboard.
This is where everything went to hell. After shutting the PC off, I plugged in the ancient 3com 3c905, and powered it back up. When you boot, instead of being asked which windows to load, it gives you the error message "error loading opterating system." Both harddrives are found in the bios. I can't use an old bootdisk, as the A drive in this system died awhile ago. (I'll look in the parts bin) I'm download Kinoppix tonight. I also tried to boot from the windows cd, but it now hangs on starting windows2000.
I fail to understand why trying to install this NIC would cause this. I don't think its the dual boot, many people have done this, and I rebooted several times before adding the card. The power was off, and I'm stumped. Please shout out ideas.

it sounds like an IRQ conflict. go into the BIOS and find Peripherals. Look at each one and compare it to the IRQ and mem range of the NIC.

 

[4745454b]

"it can be downloaded using the same "software" that your downloading knoppix on." Hey buddy, I don't know what your implying here. I downloaded Knoppix from their website, so this should be legit. I will however take a look on the sites I know of for this program. (and probably download it with that same "software")
For the record, I already reset the bios, so I'm thinking that will remove any NIC IRQ problems, but I'll double check. Knoppix finished downloading, so I'll give that a shot. BTW, does anyone know how to use it??? (or can anyone point me to the help file?)

 

[Onus]

Check that ancient NIC for jumpers, possibly including one telling it to boot from a ROM on the card.

 

[4745454b]

Hey, its not that old. It is PCI, and PnP.
I just tryed loading Knoppix on it. After hitting enter so that it loads from the cd, it then starts scanning. I properly fails to find any USB devices, and then properly finds the drives in their correct place. (20gb as hda, 120Gb as hdc, and lite-on DVD-rw as hdd.) it then trys "Looking for CD in: /dev/hda" Why is it looking for the cd in hda, when the drive is hdd? It also locks up at this point. Anyone got any idea before I start formatting??? (when I get back, I'm going to try my set of drives that were in there before I gave it to my wife.)