Hi,
I've been promising to upgrade my father's PC for a while now with the old parts I was using just before Christmas, but we keep putting it off because he uses his PC for his home business almost every night, and there's always *something* that goes wrong with a major upgrade.
I put together the following:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester (working fine before)
GEIL 2 x 512 MB PC3200 DDR (being Prime95-tested as we speak)
ASROCK 939-DUAL VSTA motherboard (new)
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 AGP (working fine before)
Western Digital WD800-something 80 GB PATA drive (working fine before)
Pioneer DVR-104 CD/DVD drive
PowerUP! 400W PSU (working fine before, not tested yet)
Since XP Home was already installed on the drive from his old computer, I thought why not just do an XP repair install to clear the old drivers? So I hit the power button, and what do you think happens? POST hard locks. Great. I try everything: removing/swapping RAM sticks, disconnecting all unnecessary peripherals, checking the front panel and USB motherboard connections, etc. The problem turned out to be a faulty IDE cable, which had been working fine 24/7 with the old motherboard. Go figure.
With that problem fixed, I got into the BIOS and double-checked the clock speeds, etc. and disabled some of the on-board stuff like the game port. Then I put the XP CD in the drive and boot from it. (The CD is original retail -- no service packs). I get to the part where I have to enter the product key, except that I misplaced it -- it's been like 5 years! -- and have no copy of it. *sigh* So I spend about 40 minutes hunting down a program to extract the product key from the hard drive. Success!
XP setup goes well -- but extremely slow! -- until the 27-hour mark where Windows begins copying the last group of files (ICW, help, COM, etc.) from the CD. Some files work, but most do not. We're talking like 30 missing files here. So I connect the hard drive to my computer and copy the whole XP setup CD to the hard drive -- no errors. However, even when I put the hard drive back into my father's computer and resumed XP setup, it still gave me a file copy error when I pointed setup to the hard drive.
I tried everything I could think of. I set the CPU speed to 1GHz, the RAM to PC-200 on one stick running single channel, tried a different XP setup CD (same release date and setup type), tried a different CD drive, etc. No matter what I did, the file copy errors remained. Sometimes the errors were the same for several tries, but other times the errors were different. I even tried pulling a heavily-tested stick of PC3200 from my system -- no luck.
At this point I thought perhaps the system was stable but XP setup had a bug, so I just kept ignoring the missing files and finished setup. The installation activated fine. IE was toast and wouldn't load, but luckily Firefox worked fine. I used that to download SP2, thinking that it would replace most of the missing files, but SP2 failed with a file copy error, too. *sigh* As a last resort, I downloaded Prime95 and have it running the blend torture test ATM to see if anything pops up.
Does anyone see what I'm missing?
Things I haven't yet tested:
- Is the CD drive vibrating too much?
- Is the PSU overloaded?
- Is the HDD/DVD transfer mode too fast?
- If I put the hard drive in my PC, will XP setup work fine?
If XP setup continues to bail, I've got a Vista RC2 disc around here somewhere that will tide him over until he can buy a copy of Vista Home Premium retail DVD.
I've been promising to upgrade my father's PC for a while now with the old parts I was using just before Christmas, but we keep putting it off because he uses his PC for his home business almost every night, and there's always *something* that goes wrong with a major upgrade.
I put together the following:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester (working fine before)
GEIL 2 x 512 MB PC3200 DDR (being Prime95-tested as we speak)
ASROCK 939-DUAL VSTA motherboard (new)
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 AGP (working fine before)
Western Digital WD800-something 80 GB PATA drive (working fine before)
Pioneer DVR-104 CD/DVD drive
PowerUP! 400W PSU (working fine before, not tested yet)
Since XP Home was already installed on the drive from his old computer, I thought why not just do an XP repair install to clear the old drivers? So I hit the power button, and what do you think happens? POST hard locks. Great. I try everything: removing/swapping RAM sticks, disconnecting all unnecessary peripherals, checking the front panel and USB motherboard connections, etc. The problem turned out to be a faulty IDE cable, which had been working fine 24/7 with the old motherboard. Go figure.
With that problem fixed, I got into the BIOS and double-checked the clock speeds, etc. and disabled some of the on-board stuff like the game port. Then I put the XP CD in the drive and boot from it. (The CD is original retail -- no service packs). I get to the part where I have to enter the product key, except that I misplaced it -- it's been like 5 years! -- and have no copy of it. *sigh* So I spend about 40 minutes hunting down a program to extract the product key from the hard drive. Success!
XP setup goes well -- but extremely slow! -- until the 27-hour mark where Windows begins copying the last group of files (ICW, help, COM, etc.) from the CD. Some files work, but most do not. We're talking like 30 missing files here. So I connect the hard drive to my computer and copy the whole XP setup CD to the hard drive -- no errors. However, even when I put the hard drive back into my father's computer and resumed XP setup, it still gave me a file copy error when I pointed setup to the hard drive.
I tried everything I could think of. I set the CPU speed to 1GHz, the RAM to PC-200 on one stick running single channel, tried a different XP setup CD (same release date and setup type), tried a different CD drive, etc. No matter what I did, the file copy errors remained. Sometimes the errors were the same for several tries, but other times the errors were different. I even tried pulling a heavily-tested stick of PC3200 from my system -- no luck.
At this point I thought perhaps the system was stable but XP setup had a bug, so I just kept ignoring the missing files and finished setup. The installation activated fine. IE was toast and wouldn't load, but luckily Firefox worked fine. I used that to download SP2, thinking that it would replace most of the missing files, but SP2 failed with a file copy error, too. *sigh* As a last resort, I downloaded Prime95 and have it running the blend torture test ATM to see if anything pops up.
Does anyone see what I'm missing?
Things I haven't yet tested:
- Is the CD drive vibrating too much?
- Is the PSU overloaded?
- Is the HDD/DVD transfer mode too fast?
- If I put the hard drive in my PC, will XP setup work fine?
If XP setup continues to bail, I've got a Vista RC2 disc around here somewhere that will tide him over until he can buy a copy of Vista Home Premium retail DVD.
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