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Guru needed: P-III WinXP install issue

R

RickyBaby

Member
Hey guys,

I got a strange problem. I'm not an idiot and I'm very computer literate. Especially with AMD systems. Built lots of computers myself.

Here is my problem. I recently got several older P3 systems. One was a dell which had a 1 gig processor in it. The other had a celery 400 (HP via chipset). Anyway, I essentially merged the systems. I moved the processor to the HP as it had more memory slots and I filled all the slots to get to 3/4gig. I hooked up everything and installed WinXP. I shut the computer down to a cold boot and when the machine boots it gives an error about NTLDR is missing. I checked and it was. Essentially the boot files got corrupted on the HD. As anyone knows, when XP is installed it reboots itself a few times. So it had been reboot a couple of times and I actually had XP running, checked device manager, installed drivers, etc. I shut it down and reboot and not ntldr is gone???

So xp is installed and will boot ... until I do a cold boot, then things get corrupted. This has happened TWICE. Yes, I installed XP 2 different times and the same thing happened each time. In fact, one of them was running the IDE from a promise PCI IDE controller (to elminate a bad on-board IDE connection). I've tried 2 different power supplies too. To eliminate that. They were both cheap shit PSs do P3s require special power supplies?

Anyway, this is weird; really weird. I think it might be a PS issue but since I'm not that familiar with these older Intel P3's I thought someone might be able to help me out.

Thanks in advance,
RB

excuse me, but Why is this in CPU/OC'ing?

wouldn't it be better in OS?
-unless you can tell me why it belongs here, it is getting moved

Done!

--AnandTech CPU Moderator apoppin
:clock:
 
Oh, forgot to mention that I'm installing into a 40gig HD. I wiped the partition with PartitionMagic, recreated it, and set it active. When I installed XP I left it format the HD with fat32. This was done in between the 2 installs too.

RB
 
Mr covert, XP does not require NTFS. It will run just fine with fat32 and I believe it runs with regular fat too but I've never done it. Many people with format C: with fat32 and D: with NTFS where C and D combined are actually 1 physical HD. Its actually fairly common. Thanks to the reply anyway.

Why would NTLDR be deleted if XP itself installs just fine ??? Hmmmm .....
 
This is a very interesting delema you have. I've installed xp over 20 times since my family first got it so i've got some experience with these issues but your case is different than any other corrupt boot thinga-majigger i've ever seen.😕 I had corrupt boot stuff happen to a couple of my computers but a reinstall fixed it. On my new rig after running xp pro for 2 weeks, i did some overclocking tweeks and when I rebooted xp wouldn't even boot into safe mode and aparently lost a boot file. but after 3 hours of rebooting and trying to get xp's repair function working I did a reboot and the computer booted up fine. my advice would be to try to reboot for a while(you probably have) try installing again but let xp format the drive. Do this computer work with other os's?
 
P3 CPUs do not need special supplies.

From the intel site the TDP of the 400/433 S370 PPGA celeron are both about 24W.

The specs for the P3 are here:

http://processorfinder.intel.com/list.aspx?ProcFam=25

There are quite a few on that page for S370, but they are all FC-PGA or FC-PGA2.

The TDPs of the P3 I checked were about 28 - 29W so its only an extra 5 watts so even the HP PSUs or others should not have a problem. However the MAX temp of the CPU is 15 C less, so maybe its a temperature problem.

I would check that the motherboard in the HP machine supports the P3 processor. It may be that the motherboard only supports 100 Meg FSB, and the P3 is 133 Meg. Why not use the Dell machine for the P3, I know it has less memory slots, but they may take bigger DIMMS.

I have an old HP machine with a Celeron 433, and its very picky about memory, and its CPUs. It uses an intel 810 chipset, and your limited to PPGA processors with an FSB of 100 Meg. The HP motherboard you have may have that limitation.

Check what support you can get on both the HP and the Dell motherboards.

It may be that when the PC comes out of the boot process it is corrupting the disk.

Rob Murphy
 
Could even be the disk or controller, I suppose, given that the parts came from different machines. Can you swap those out on the next attempt? I'd check the disk parameters in the BIOS as well and make sure it is detecting correctly. The cold boot thing is interesting because it involves a power cycle.
 
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