Please Help! XP Pro Installation Problems!

deversol

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May 22, 2001
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I have spent several days trying to get XP installed on my system, to no avail.

I have an Asus A7v133 mobo with a 1.3GHz Athlon, and am installing XP on a WD SE 80gb hard drive formatted in NTFS. I also have 768MB of Crucial PC133 CL2 SDRAM, a Leadtek GeForce4 Ti4400, and a Mitsumi CD-ROM.

I booted with the XP cd and setup started. After it copied the temporary files from the CD, I got a message saying "Starting up Windows" and it just hangs there...I had moved the hard drive from master to slave, and from the primary to secondary IDE port and get the same result...I have removed all but one RAM chip, removed the sound card, ethernet card, everything but the video card, hard drive, and CD-ROM. I had also installed an old GeForce2 32MB card instead of the GeForce4. I have also flashed the BIOS to the latest version on the Asus site, ver. 1.009, and get the same result no matter what.

I then put the hard drive in my roommate's computer and was able to get XP completely installed on that hard drive with no problems. I then put that hard drive in my PC, as the master drive, and set up BIOS so that it will boot from there first....I then get an error during boot-up saying something like "Disk read error, press ctrl+alt+delete to reboot"...I can understand that, the HAL is all messed up, but it was installed on my roommate's PC with no problems, meaning that the hard drive is fine.

I had also installed Win2k Pro on that same hard drive in my PC with the same hardware configuration as above, and had no problems. Then, while in Windows 2k, I inserted the Windows XP cd and started installing it. After the files were copied from the CD, XP rebooted my system. During reboot, the black Windows XP screen came up saying it was loading, and it just froze. I tried to reboot several times and it did the same thing each time. Then, I booted from the Windows XP cd and started to install it again. Once the files were copied from the CD, a message at the bottom of the screen said something like "Starting Microsoft Windows" and it just hangs there...

I had also used the official XP boot disks available from Microsoft. After all of the drivers are copied, I get the "Starting Microsoft Windows" message.

Last but not least, I copied all of the files from the i386 directory to my hard drive, booted with a Win98 floppy into DOS, and ran Setup from there....same result as above...

I feel like I have tried everything possible in getting XP installed. Can anyone think of anything else I can try? Ive been at this for days now with no luck...Thankfully I still have Win2k installed on another hard drive so I can still use my computer....

Any ideas? Thanks for any assistance!

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by deversol on 07/17/02 08:08 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 

jlanka

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just for grins, try backing off on the memory timings, i.e. make it CAS 3 instead of 2, if that doesn't work also try running it at 100 instead of 133 mhz. (RAM)

I've had XP install problems, and agressive memory timings were the answer (even though the RAM you have SHOULD be able to handle CL2/133)

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>
 

thefaresteast

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it's advisable that you flash you bios to 1009 before you installing XP. and it's a MUST to thoroughly clean your bios setting and reconfigure it after the flash. plug in only AGP card, mouse and keyboard. plug in back the rest after the first windows XP bootup and login. another thing to follow it to used only NTFS.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by thefaresteast on 07/18/02 01:34 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 

deversol

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Thanks for the response Thefaresteast. I have flashed my BIOS to ver. 1009, as well as only having installed my mouse, keyboard, video card, memory, CD-ROM, and hard drive. I need to make sure that I loaded the BIOS defaults and reconfigured accordingly. I'll check it out this evening once I get home from work and post any results. Its really strange why Im having so many problems getting this installed...Thanks again!
 

jiffy

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My WD won't work set at Master, not sure about slave, but the other setting works fine, what ever it is sp/ps.




Hey Baby, want to play with my computer?