ECS Nforce3-a won't boot up winxp sp2

[motown1064]

I bought a ecs nforce3-a with AMD 64 3000+ cpu (Fry's). I installed known good drives with win xp sp2 in the normal amster slave on IDE 1 and a cdrom and dvdrw on ide 2. The drive will not boot up for me at all I get the blue screen of death but the drive and data are good. When I tried to boot from the cd to run chdisk and repair windows it continually reboots the system whenever it tries to access the master drive. The ram is good also.

 

[furballi]

Connect the MASTER HDD to the PRIMARY IDE channel. Wipe the HDD and clean install WXP SP2. Always clean install WXP for best performance, especially when working with a new MB and CPU.

 

[motown1064]

Yeah I was trying to avoid that but it looks like the only way. Never had a problem with any other upgrades of MB like this.

 

[motown1064]

Tried to do fresh install but no joy. System restarts before the install completes and I have wiped it at least 3 times now.

 

[Zachariah]

I went over to a friend of mine's house today cause he was having the exact same problem you are. It wouldn't allow us to do the repair install but when we deleted the partion and reformatted it worked fine.

Of course you said you did that so I'm a bit clueless. I have used kill disk once before with windows xp on an old athlon xp system that was acting like that. It completely deletes any info on the disk including partion info, however I have heard that it can be bad for a HDD, no idea whether or not that's true. Could be worth a shot if its still not working.

 

[furballi]

Need to zero the HDD. Download the utility from Seagate. Make sure your have reset CMOS, and start with a fresh HDD. Make sure the MBR is also deleted from the HDD.

 

[Zap]

It is actually pretty normal for Windows XP to magically die when switching to a motherboard that's very different from what it was installed on (especially different chipset). What is NOT normal is XP not installing on a freshly formatted hard drive. You may want to download the Ultimate Boot CD to use some of the tests on it to check for CPU and RAM stability.