[wazoo]

I am dealing with what, for me at least, is the MOTHER of all upgrade problems on a friend’s computer.

Here’s the scoop:

He was running an CUSL-2 ASUS M/B with a P3 chip for a few years. Several months ago, he started getting a problem where Win98 would reboot during startup at the point where the screen resolution would reset just prior to the desktop appearing. The problem was somewhat intermittent, and when it happened, it would sometimes take seven or so reboots to get to the Win98 desktop (often after going into safemode first).

So, we had him upgrade to WinXP Pro thinking that it was the Win98 install gone funky.

No go. It began happening shortly after the XP upgrade and would again occur just at the resolution switch just prior to the login screen appearing.

Focusing on the resolution switch trigger, I figured it might be a bad video card (he had an old Geforce2). So… we upgraded him to an ATI Radeon 9600. Simultaneous to this, he also decided to upgrade his entire system, so we build a new system with an NF7-S ver. 2.0 Abit M/B, new Antec 430 Watt PS, new Mushkin 3200PC Ram, AMD 2500+ Barton CPU.

The problem continued……

Figuring that it must be something with the hard drives, we turned our attention there. He had two legacy hard drives in the system as well. A 20gig primary OS drive and a 10 gig data drive. During troubleshooting, we ultimately installed WinXP Pro on the 10 gig drive as well as we often could not start the system off the 20 gig due to the reboot problems. The 10 gig, however, did not seem to give us problems.

We even went as far as low-level reformatting the 20gig and reinstalling XP. However, the problem would resurface after a day or two.

So…. We then focused on a USB joystick he had purchased that he seemed to think came on the scene about the time the original reboot problems began. We removed it and the system ran stable for four days.

Declaring victory, we installed a new 80gig Maxtor drive, quick NTFS formatted it, and then used PowerQuest 7.01 to copy the 20gig to the 80gig as the plan was to now use the 80gig as the primary drive, wipe the 20gig, and use the 20gig for data storage.

After the drive copy, we rebooted, and the whole problem started again!!!

So I had him reformat the 80gig, take the 20gig offline, and try installing XP on the 80gig. He did, and now the problem is just happening with the 80gig alone.

I am completely out of ideas. We have swapped every piece of equipment out on the system except the mouse and the case (although he tried rebooting without the mouse plugged in and the problem was the same).

After WinXP Pro finally reboots, it tells us the problem was with the ATI 9600 in the error report window. Hard to believe though, as we had the same problem with a GeForce2 card by NVidia.

Could this be virus related even though the hard drives have been reformatted?

As mentioned, on the last attempt with the 80gig drive, we low-level reformatted it and then installed WinXP without any other harddrives online and the problem is still there.

I’m at the end of my rope….

Any ideas??

Regards,

Wazoo