New build, BSOD on startup

[jeffnunamaker]

Ok, I think I now what the answer will be, but here goes anyway.

Just did a massive "upgrade" to my machine. It really is not an upgrade, I am just trying to save a few bucks and was hoping to use my old SATA drive with XP on it. It was from a DELL XPS, so the copy is an OEM and I do not have the disc. I do have an XP disc, but it is a different version, which I will get into more later.

So, new parts are an ASRock Z77 Extreme4, I3-2120, 2x8 GSKILL DDR3 1600, and a Radeon 7770 GPU, new case as well. Like I said, reusing my SATA HDD and my DVD drives.

The HDD has Windows XP Media Edition (not 64 bit) SP3 installed on it, and I was really just hoping to be able to drop it in the machine and have it work. Obviously that was a no. I installed everything in the new rig, booted it up, entered the BIOS and looked around. It recognized everything as far as I could tell just fine. Exited, and resumed boot from HDD, and it got as far as the XP splash screen and then BSOD (blue screen of death). Rebooted, looked at the BIOS and made some changes suggested by the MB manual, tried it again, same thing. Does it if I try to go to safe mode as well.

Tried booting from the CD that came with the MB, no dice there either.

So, I stuck the drive back in my old machine to make sure it was OK, and it boots fine there still. So, I thought I would try installing a fresh copy of XP and see if the new motherboard would just work it's magic, but more issues...

So still working with the old machine. Set BIOS to boot from Windows XP CD (remember, this is a different version of XP then what is currently installed). It boots up, enters setup, but as soon as it goes through a minute or so of initializing things, I get another BSOD... Tried the same thing on the new rig, and same result with the same BSOD. Enters setup, but BSOD as soon as it tries moving past setup. I cannot even enter any commands or choose repair.

At this point, I am wondering if my old faithful SATA drive's copy of XP is just too old (and probably has tons of registry errors) to be able to do anything with hardware this new. The MOBO says it is XP compatible, but not sure my version is happy with it...

I guess I am wondering if there is a fix for this or if I just need to wait 6 weeks, get a new drive and a fresh copy of Windows 8 for 70 bucks. I know I need to anyway since I need a 64 bit OS for my new setup, but I guess I just need to know if my shiny new parts are useless for 6 weeks or not? I really have no problem wiping my drive and starting from clean XP, but I cannot even seem to get that far....

 

[JKatwyopc]

Your problem is that the OEM version of Winows XP was not installed with the Motherboard and Chipset drivers to operate on your new board. OEM versions of wndows are not intended to be used with a different motherboard from the original one. Doing so would violate the OEM license agreement which ties that copy of the OS to the motherboard. You will have to buy a new version of windows to install on the computer because you have changed so much of it that it is considered a "new" PC according to the license aggreement.

 

[invlem]

Basically if you're doing a major hardware swap (you've effectively replaced all the important hardware in this system). Regardless if its OEM or full retail edition of windows, reinstalling the OS becomes pretty much a requirement after this many changes. It's not so much the problem that you have an OEM version of windows, its that you've done so many hardware changes that you've probably created countless driver conflicts (the same thing would happen if you swapped out all the hardware on a retail copy).

It seems you've figured that part out by now, chances are your BSOD on the fresh install is due to a driver incompatibility, remember, XP was made 10 years ago, you'll most likely need to load SATA controller drivers that are compatible with your motherboard. If you still have a floppy drive in that case, probably the easiest way of going about it, you need to tell the XP setup that you have 3rd party drivers you want to install. SATA drivers should be downloadable from the manufacturer website for whatever version of windows you need.