XP Home Woes

[Plotloss]

A mate has a machine, motherboard died, original motherboard had onboard VGA. Previously the HDD was installed in a machine with an GeForce AGP card.

HDD whipped out, installed on a new Mobo (3rd) with a Radeon 9600.

XP starts to boot normally, tries to draw the XP logo screen with the little moving bar and reboots itself.

XP CD inserted, install XP as a Repair install (not via recovery console). Repeatedly failed at Installing Devices (34 minutes). Could draw the XP logo screen and the install GUI fine.

Had a quick look on Usenet, various instances of this issue. Recommendation to stop svchost.exe during install, finally manage to get it past the 34 minutes stage and complete the repair install.

Reboot and its exactly the same, dies when attempting to draw the XP Logo screen.

Am thinking device driver issue on the VGA card currently.

123Gb with 8Gb free so dont really want to wipe it.

Any thoughts gentlemen?

[warmfuzzies]

I would suggest a safe mode boot, and then remove all traces of teh Nvidia card and drivers from the system and hardware list. Go to driverheaven.com and d/l the driver cleaner utility , but use teh add/remove for getting rid of the Nvidia drivers first, then use the driver cleaner.
SO to recap.
Safe mode, add/remove all graphics info, both cards.
Hardware list, remove the cards if they exist.
Driver cleaner, then reboot.
XP will find your new card, install VGA drivers, then reboot, then install the proper ATI drivers, cat4.4 is most current.

Kevin

[andyf007]

Will it boot in vga mode?

Edited to add: I was going to get to that bit WF. In the add/remove hardware wizard you can also select a check box to show all hardware including "inactive" devices, just to make sure you get the lot out.

>> Edited by andyf007 on Wednesday 12th May 11:37

[Plotloss]

Cant even boot in safe mode.

Reboot everytime it attempts to draw that screen.

This one:



Just reboots and if you leave it will happen forever and a day...

[Plotloss]

andyf007 said:

Will it boot in vga mode?

How do you mean?

From the F8 menu like NT used to?

The current route of thinking I am going down is to remove the radeon and plug in an old TNT2 PCI card that I have.

Then I can delete all the devices etc and try installing the card.

There is some suggestion its related to the XP activation malarky and that Windows thinks its being run on a different machine so disallows start...

[GregE240]

Could always install the HDD in another machine, get what you want off it and then flatten the bugger and reinstall?

Must admit when I installed our ATI card it was a total PITA. XP insisted on using ita own ATI driver which just caused the machine to reboot continuously.

Only solution was to reboot in VGA mode, and then install the pukka ATI driver (from ATIs website)

That any good to you?

[andyf007]

F8 was the route, but in your case it's still in vga mode during that screen so it won't work. AFAIK the hardware changes would have resulted in XP asking you to reactivate, I didn't think it required you to reinstall XP, but I could be wrong. It sounds a bit like a graphics card/motherboard fault. As you have another card I would try that route, but consider bios updates or compatibility issues between the card and the MB too.

Andy

[Plotloss]

Unfortunately I just dont have the spare 115Gb.

Vast majority of it is music and movies so a pain in the arse to download again.

I am starting to think that XP is a step backwards...

[Plotloss]

Mobo and VGA card both brand spanking new.

Though, the VGA card had been opened previously which I found sort of suspect.

[GregE240]

Sounds like Enable VGa mode, install proper ATI driver, then reoot.

That should do it Matt.

[andyf007]

Plotloss said:

Unfortunately I just dont have the spare 115Gb. Vast majority of it is music and movies so a pain in the arse to download again. I am starting to think that XP is a step backwards...

I would always recommend installing XP and programs on a seperate HDD or, at the very least, a different partition, especially on large drives where you will use them for data storage too. This allows you to wipe and reinstall as much as you like, without deleting your data.

You could find buying a good 20Gb HDD and installing to that. Then hooking up the old drive on the second IDE as a data store, delete all the old XP and program files from it when you have imported any settings, email stuff etc.

Andy

[Plotloss]

Yep benefit of hindsight and all that.

Its got two 125Gb disks.

One was originally earmarked for music only and one for the operating system and programs.

However the music is now 120Gb on its own so the movies had to be moved onto this disk.

Murphy then stuck his head up and said I'm 'aving that...

[andyf007]

Plotloss said:

Yep benefit of hindsight and all that. Its got two 125Gb disks. One was originally earmarked for music only and one for the operating system and programs. However the music is now 120Gb on its own so the movies had to be moved onto this disk. Murphy then stuck his head up and said I'm 'aving that...

You could remove the XP disk and do a fresh install on the music one? It shouldn't be too bad assuming that you keep them well defragged.

I would still nip into PCWorld and grab a 20Gb or so. They might throw it in free with the Terabyte disk you'll soon be needing

Andy

[zumbruk]

Sony's new PVR has a terabyte disk.

What you need is a Petabox; www.archive.org/web/petabox.php

(Oh, and my experience of XP Home has been uniformly bad. Hundreds of crashes over the last few weeks. Two re-installs seem to have sorted it. Sigh. How can MS get away with selling this garbage?)

[annodomini2]

I've seen many reports of problems with people switching between ati and nvidia cards, rumor has it the drivers have built in stuff to stop your graphics card from working if you swap it for the other brand.

If you search on google (i don't have the link to hand) there is software out there to completely remove the nvidia drivers. I believe the same exists somewhere for ati.

[andyf007]

Plotloss's New Wardrobe

XP Pro is far better than Home. But, unfortunately the problem with Microsoft's software is us , not them.

To produce one OS that will run on that many different hardware platforms, with that many different applications (including those that aren't tested)and do that many different things is a fair achievement in my book.

But then to pass it to numpties like us to up deserves a medal.

Andy

>> Edited by andyf007 on Wednesday 12th May 13:48

[telecat]

XP pro is like NT. It has a Hardware Abstaction Layer (HAL) which communicates with the Board. Change the board and the HAL doesn't recognise it. No way around it except to rebuild.

[Plotloss]

Never had a trouble with the W2K implementation of HAL.

Swap out boards and cards willy nilly and its fine. This is mainly the reason I have never moved off 2000.

That Petabox is a fabulous bit of kit.

I would never need visit emule again!

[zumbruk]

andyf007 said:

XP Pro is far better than Home.

Err, it's 90% the same.

andyf007 said:

But, unfortunately the problem with Microsoft's software is us , not them.

Sorry, but I disagree. Microsoft's software is trash.

[ATG]

zumbruk said:

Sorry, but I disagree. Microsoft's software is trash.

Yawn.