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Session 3 Initialization Error (BSOD) during fresh winxp home install

Z

ziddey

Member
So I was helping to setup a new machine for someone today and ran into a little trouble. Here's some relevent hardware:

mach speed something motherboard (via p4m266 chipset i believe)
celery d 2.8 (supported by motherboard)
512mb pc3200 ultra ram (running at 266) (can you see the parts came from tigerdirect. pfft)
seagate 120gb 7200
gf fx 5700le 256mb (xfx)

xp home oem edition

It goes through loading the drivers and then to the starting windows screen. Then it drops a "session 3 initialization error" bsod and dies. I did a search and found little info, and the solutions I have to pay $10 for or something. I've built quite a fair number of machines, but this was the first time with a p4m266 chipset, and I just happened to run into this and am a little stumped..

Thanks

Also, I've tried toggling various flags from within the bios. Video shadowing. Bios shadowing. delay transaction. timings. everything. I'm running ridiculously slack timings, and have any of what anyone would have on off in the bios and it still doesn't work. I would say bios update might fix it but it's already the latest one. !!
 

Any time you see a BSOD during installation of an OS , the first thing you gotta look at is RAM. Try testing it with Memtest+ or find another stick and reinstall with that one in the PC.

I'd also set my BIOS to "Load optimized defaults" before installation. Just to make sure you didn't play with a setting you shouldn't have.

Is that all the hardware in the machine? If you had any other PCI cards in there , remove them before installation.

I've never heard of Machspeed. Looks like you really skimped out on the motherboard and motherboard chipset. Not a good idea. I hope you didn't pay much for it.

You also haven't mentioned what kind of PSU you're using. Could be a factor too , though I'd check out the ram first.
 
Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't choose the parts, and the purchaser was on a very limited budget (about $250 and wanted to be able to game, had to be Intel, so primary focus was on the video card). I hadn't heard of Machspeed either (must be a tigerdirect exclusive. for the record, I'm not a fan of them either). I would be suspicious of the ram too, and if I had another stick to try, I would (the build didn't take place at my bench, so I'll be bringing some test modules next time).

But besides ram (which I applied extra voltage and slacked timings and freq as much as possible to even see if it'll run that way) and the overall system (all tweaks toned down), I can't think of anything else. Does anyone know specifically what "session 3 initialization error" means? I have never seen it before, and it's so rare on the net (google doesn't turn up any microsoft knowledge base pages on it, or I'm blind).

Thanks again
 
OH WOW. I came across that page many times but I only scrolled to where it said "click here for solution" and then I had to pay for it. I never realized there were comments below. It seems like a mixed bag though. It is some via chipset (southbridge too) so it could be that xp doesn't have native support for whatever ide it is. But he didn't want a floppy when he built his system, so I'll probably have to lug one over. I really hope it's just a matter of ide drivers. I really do!


edit: and on top of that, i never searched with the underscores, and doing so yielded a lot more results. I'm going to hit the sack for the night but will try to comb through the results tomor'row morning

that is... unless you beat me to it 😉 😉

thanks again
 
hmm, ram tested good. Also, friend who bought the same motherboard claimed to not need to load any specific ide controller drivers during setup (doesn't make any mention in manual either) so I'll assume that's fine too. What else could it be? Tried different optical drive. And cd proves to be ok (test install on other bench computer).

What could it be??
 
RSTY%^G&%$WREF

tried everything. checked every piece of hardware. and software even.. the winxp disc which worked perfectly on another computer decided to be the issue here. i tried first a win2k disc of mine and it was perfect. then i tried my own winxp cd and it was perfect. what the hell? the xp cd at question works fine on all my other machines. i even tried using a known good optical drive with that cd later on to test and it still failed on that computer. what??
 
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