strange XP reinstall issue

[rcpilot]

Hello everyone - I hope you can give me some insight as my brain is a little fried from this problem.

I have the following system:
P4 2.4
Asus p4s533 motherboard
512 mem
geforce 4
Western digital 120G HD with ultra DMA 133

I am having a strange issue with my system, everything has been running flawless for about a year. Today my wifes computer crashed and I get a new one, so I am in the process of formatting my hard drive to give her a clean install of XP. My problem occurs here - I boot off the cdrom and get to the promt to start the reinstall process, I can get all the way to the point where it is about to format a hard drive partition and it just shuts down. I have been trouble shooting this all day and here is what I have come up with, if I boot off the cdrom and let it sit at the first screen where it askes if you want to repair or continue - a couple of minutes later it shutsdown. If I don't boot from cd and let it boot to the OS thats still on it - it runs like a champ! I don't understand. I tried placing another HD in the machine (also WD but not Ultra dma 133) and it booted off cd and installed XP with no issues.

I'm down to the fact that it only occurs when I boot off the XP cd (I have two and it does it for both) and it only occurs with the WD 120 Gb Ultra DMA 133 drive - so my next question is is there anyway to step the 133 down to the normal DMA speed and try it that way as the HD is the only issue now?

Thanks for any insight.

--jer

[john66]

I have never managed to do a Clean install using the CDrom

so i always use the
6 bootdisks from Microsoft
its slow but it works.

get it here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

clik .exe file
youll need 6 floppies-load all 6
put in no.1
reboot
and follow instructions
put i cd during process

hope this helps
(ps.the link is for xpPro -if u have home youll require the xphome version-look downloads for bootdisks xp home)

[rcpilot]

Thanks I'll give this a try.

--jer

[rcpilot]

Still a no go

I even went as far as trying to install Windows 2000 and it still shutdown within 2 minutes of the Repair or Continue screeen.

I'm kinda at a loss here - I'm sure it must be a mobo setting or an issue with the HDD - my only problem with all this is the damn thing will boot into windows and run for hours without any isues at all.

--jer

[rcpilot]

Well, I never figured out the issue which sucks because thats the faster HDD I have. However I put in a Western Digital 20 Gb HDD and installed XP and have been working on it since this morning with no issues. I also placed the 80 Gb drive as the slave and created 3 partitions on it. No issues what so ever - I can store all the data I want to them with out having shutdowns. But if I try to run any windows install using that HDD as the boot drive the computer will shutdown after about 2 minutes of the install. I did find 2 other people that had the exact same issue with different HDD's but niether case had a resolution to them.

If anyone has any other insight please feel free to speak up.

--jer

[GSM Super Star]

A couple things to try is:

* Reset BIOS to Factory Settings

* Try it on another IDE Cable

* Unplug and Remove all unnessasary hardware (sounds extreme but sometimes makes a difference)

* Run IBM Drive Fitness test on the drive, you can download from here - http://www.hitachigst.com/downloads/dft32_v361_b12.exe

Hope it helps

[rcpilot]

Well if I get a chance I'll run the drive fitness on it, but I really don't think its a bad drive as it worked flawlessly for a year and just wont allow an install to happen. I'm really puzzeled by this one and don't think I'm going to stress over it anymore as its working as a slave.

I had tried a different ide cable and did set the mobo settings to default - I also tried flashing the bios to the most recent. Nothing seemed to work, yet I put a different drive in the same location using the same cables and the install was easy.

Thanks for the help.

--jer

[Play_The_0dds]

GSM Super Star, had good advice. the cable could very well be your problem. if your wifes computer had a ultra dma 66 drive in it and you put a umda100 in it and her board supports umda100 xp will do what you describe if you didnt use a umda100/133 cable. the shielding for the cables is different and the data transferr wires inside are different(even though the cables look the same). you can go in the bios and take the ide off auto and set it to umda 66 and it will probably install just fine. also he could be correct tellingyou to load setup or failsafe defaults because you could have a bios setting, like bios shadowing, video caching......causing the shutdown. if you have for example a seagate utility installed with a press "this" key to boot from cd screen when you boot up, you will have to use it's hot key to load the cd to start the install also. some motherboard have the same feature, like pc chips for one.

[rcpilot]

The pc my wife now has was my old one, the only new piece in the pc is her old hdd. So when it was my pc the thing ran great, but just trying to run a reinstall of windows and its messed up the box real good. As I said before I changed the hdd so that my wifes is now the master and I am working from her pc right now - everything runs great - however, if I run any 3d game or tr running the 3D Mark 2003 tool it gets about 5 - 10 minutes into it and then the machine shuts down - I can't figure it out. I have downloaded many different utilities to monitor cpu and case heat (cpu runs at 41 C consistantly until you run a load on it and it goes up to about 66C) I have yet to run a game and have the machine shutdown on me so I can go back to the log to see what the temp was right before shutdown but I'm not thinking its a heating issue. I am however thinking the issue might lie in the power supply, as if I put a load on the video card it migh make the power supply puke and my machine shuts down. What do you think?

--Jer

[GSM Super Star]

Hi mate I have had the same problem today at work with a Windows ME Install. When I booted from the CD I got the message saying "Remove all Floppy Disks and Restart Your Machine" and when I boot from a floppy to load setup it just goes back to the Prompt.

I fixed this by changing the memory stick. It all worked fine from there.

Give it a try

[rcpilot]

Well I got a chance to sit down with the machine this evening and really give it a look over. I had purchased a new 512 ram and a new power supply as those seem to be the culprit in other peoples machines - I was really leaning towards the memory due to the issue only happening when running hi-res graphics and really utilizing all the memory. I wanted to give the box a cleaning and redo the cpu goop with some good artic silver 5 - when I tried to take the cpu fan off I noticed that half of it was loose - which turned a whole bunch of lights on in my head. After cleaning the whole case and reseating the cpu heatsink and fan with the new goop my machine runs at a nominal temp of 31-32 degrees Celcius and when it ran through 3D Mark 2003 it only went up to around 43 degrees celcius. Plus I never had the issue of a shutdown occuring. This make sense as the machine never gave me any real problems before and now all the sudden it just shutsdown. We'll find out for sure when I play Far Cry in a moment - but for now it seems like it was just overheating.

Thanks for all the info and I'll post again with any more results.

--jer

[tkistre]

If the WinXP install works fine on a different drive and you wanted to use the larger one, why don't you try and Ghost the smaller drive that is running to the larger one you want to use? That won't cost you much time or effort.

[rcpilot]

tkistre: Thanks for the tip - I actually never thought of that. I was able to sucessfully play the whoile far cry demo from pc gamer with out 1 hitch or slowdown - I am pretty sure that the problem was overheating - my lof file shows that before I fixed the cpu hsf I was running 45C idle and going up to almost 70C right before it shutdown, now I am running 30C idel and only hit 41C during the whole far cry demo.

I m going to try a normal windows XP install on the 80Gb drive tonight, I am hoping that the same overheating issue was the culprit there too and the install will continue without a hitch, not sure though.

Since I had bought them anyway I went ahead and replaced the powersupply and added the other 512Mb of ram to a total of 1Gb in my wifes machine - I don't think she'll use it all but she wont run out .

--jer

[GSM Super Star]

Glad to hear you got it sorted mate

Good Luck