Every install of WinXP eventually fails

[Kalessian]

A little while back I installed an Opteron 165 in the rig in my sig. I got it to boot up fine without problems right away at 2.2ghz. It was Prime stable.

But I noticed that WinXP didn't recognize that it was two cores. I upgraded from a Venice 3000+, so I went to AMD's site and installed the X2 driver.

It asked for a restart. GRUB loaded up fine, picked WinXP to boot up, blank screen forever. Reboot, pick WinXP again, Windows boot menu popped up, picked start normally, blank screen. Picked Safe Mode the next time, it locks up on "mup.sys". Looked around the web, apparently this is a common problem and there's no solution. So I said hell with it and just left Windows unusable.

Booted up in Gentoo, everything was fine. Recompiled my kernel to support SMP, etc, kinfocenter reports 2 cores, and at 2.2ghz it compiled stuff faster than my old 3000+ at 2.7ghz. All tests for stability passed brilliantly.

I've been running in Gentoo only for the past few monthes. I decided that I wanted to upgrade to Conroe in July, so I'm selling this entire system. For this reason I've finally decided to see what kind of overclock I can get on this 165, since I've been running it at 2.2ghz since forever.

So I backed it down to stock speeds and reinstalled WinXP. The install went perfectly. Once the install was over and I was in the finished XP, I checked for two cores and yep, there they are.

I rebooted, and bam, back to the same mup.sys problem. I've reinstalled WindowsXP now about 10 times. Each time I restart after the install finishes, it goes blank screen on me and I have to reinstall again. This is very strange since it has to reboot a couple of times during the install itself, and those reboots work fine (and off the harddrive at that). I pulled a GB of RAM out, I'm running on totally stock, Linux stress tests reports a completely stable system, but I can't reboot WinXP without it dying.

Any ideas? I gotta sell this soon or it won't be worth as much, so I can't spend a month trying out different BIOS revisions, CPU's, Drives, etc. But I don't want to sell this stuff if there's something wrong with it.

thanks

 

[Slikkster]

I suggest you change the title of your thread to something that doesn't make it look like a "bash XP" and "praise Linux" thread. A simple insertion of the word "my" would do the trick. Otherwise, when one first looks at it, it appears that you're just trying to knock Microsoft.

 

[mountcarlmore]

i had the exact same problem, wouldnt you know. i was trying to install xp pro, i kept having a perfectly fine install and then after one restart, it brought me to a blank screen. When i was in windows after the install it was perfectly fine. i installed the network drivers and downloaded prime95, it passed for a few hours, but always blank on restart. I reinstalled about 10 times, before i gave up and tried xp home. what do you know, two months later and windows is still alive. I honestly dont know what the hell that was all about, but youre not alone...

 

[xtknight]

Do you have ACPI/APIC enabled in the BIOS? Try disabling it then enabling it again... That's all I can think of.

 

[Kalessian]

thanks guys

Originally posted by: mountcarlmore
i had the exact same problem, wouldnt you know. i was trying to install xp pro, i kept having a perfectly fine install and then after one restart, it brought me to a blank screen. When i was in windows after the install it was perfectly fine. i installed the network drivers and downloaded prime95, it passed for a few hours, but always blank on restart. I reinstalled about 10 times, before i gave up and tried xp home. what do you know, two months later and windows is still alive. I honestly dont know what the hell that was all about, but youre not alone...

Very strange. I'll head over to my uncle's and grab a copy of his XP disk to see if it works.

xt, that didn't work. Did you want me to just turn it on and off and try the blank windows or start a reinstall cycle over again?

 

[Kalessian]

Yeah it was definately a corrupted disk.

 

[nonnormman]

Originally posted by: Kalessian
Yeah it was definately a corrupted disk.

That's exactly what happened to me. I got another copy of xp pro and it installed perfectly.