installation issues winxp-style

[Doom-Child]

Alright, I'm about to pull my hair out...

My computer hasn't worked since Christmas. I've been reduced to an existence based around using other people's computers, like some digital hobo, hitchhiking on whatever signal I could lay my hands on. And, what's worse, it's still a mystery as to how it happened.

I ran a Thunderbird 1.33 Ghz on an Asus A7A266 board with 512 Mb of DDRAM (my summer job paid VERY well). I ran WinXP, which had never given me any problems. Then, for no readily discernable reason, it stopped. One day, when rebooting, I get the message "Primary Slave Drive Fails". That's one of those "oh-shit" moments. So I check the drive. Nothing's wrong with it. Jumpers are right, no signs of charring. So I restart Windows, and nothing happens. It works fine. Hoping that it was just "one of those things", I continue on my merry way. That night, it stops responding.

It's almost like I made it mad.

Since then, I have tested every piece of hardware I have. I've put my drives in my g/f's machine. No problem with any of my drives. I've put her perfectly working drives into my machine. No dice. I've used different IDE cables. I've flashed and updated the BIOS. Now, I've even changed motherboards (MSI K7T266), and nothing's working. I can boot the Win98 CD into DOS mode and mess around, but the WinXP and Win2000 setups don't work. They might start, but once they move between twenty and a hundred files, they say that something's wrong with the file on the CD. Of course, this is the same CD that last week put WinXP on my roommate's machine. Or sometimes I get an incredibly cryptic message, like the one on my screen right now:

"File setupdd.sys could not be loaded.
The error code is 7.

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to restart."

Oh, it tries to be clever sometimes, like changing the seven to a fourteen, but on the whole, it's just sitting there like a three thousand dollar dildo that no one in their right mind would use for any kind of sexual purposes, unless those purposes involved electric shocks and massive internal bleeding.

The most damning part is that I can drop my HD in another computer, run setup, get into a working Windows environment, and then put the drive back on my machine and get the wonderful Windows startup error message telling me that the file \system32\drivers\ntfs.sys is missing or corrupted. Right. That's why, thiry seconds ago, I could successfully get into and out of Windows when it was attached to another box.

So, if any of you work for Microsoft, let me be the first to say, "Fuck you, and I hope your nasty flipper babies have hooves." If any of the rest of you have any suggestions, HELP!

DC

[Lüt]

I'll spare you from my Win95B rant this time, but be ready next time you have trouble.

[Tobester]

jesus christ

that sounds fucked

that's why im never upgrading from win98

[læmænt]

Err, this most certainly doesn't look like Windows is at fault.

[Doom-Child]

Normally, I'd take rants like that as sound advice from someone as knowledgable as you, but Windows 95 and 98 both shat on me as well. The 98 setup formatted my drive, put a few temp files there, rinsed, and repeated. For two hours.

DC

[Tobester]

that's still a pretty fucked system you got there.

[Doom-Child]

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

DC

[Tobester]

Glad to do my part.

[Arioch]

My head hurts.

Ok, with that out of the way ...

If your "copy" of Windows XP is burned using Nero there are known issues with the final result.

Even if you perform a successful installation, you are NOT supposed to be able to just move a hard drive to another computer and expect it to work (not with the way the NT5+ driver system and system hive works), you have to perform a repair installation to get it to use the new base parameters. (Note: this is why changing BIOS parameters for a hard drive on a working installation of 2k/XP is BAD and won't work right off the bat.)

Aside from all that I will make no guesses as to why your system is now systematically rejecting Windows. Or at least, I'll keep my guesses to myself.

[Shaviro]

I don't think that is Windows. You're motherboard, perhaps?

[Doom-Child]

No no, I'm using a brand new (like, I got it in yesterday) board.

DC

[BattleCat]

ntfs.sys ? ntfs is a special harddisk format like Fat32. Did you convert your harddisk to ntfs during the installation of WindowsXp ?? it should be fat32.

[Shaviro]

WinXP uses ntfs.

[Doom-Child]

Yeah. FAT sucks.

Well, I have just seen all the evidence I ever needed to see to believe that God really does meddle in the affairs of us humans. Not that He'd do so for anything other than entertainment.

It was the RAM. The God-Damned RAM. I put my roommate's CPU in my box, with the effectiveness of my computer remaining at a healthy zero. Then, for kicks, I took out my two sticks of 256 DDR and put in his one stick of 512 DDR. The effect was instantaneous and thoroughly gratifying. XP is finishing off the last of the setup shiznit now. Now I just have to see if my RAM works in his box, and I'll be back in business. PHOBOS is back again, and I am no longer the digital hobo.

DC

[Shaviro]

Congratulations, DC. I've had that problem as well, now that come to think of it.

The RAM was defect and therefore it corrupted the files on your harddisk. If I only had remembered I could've told you the problem earlier.

[fodders]

CPU is overheating, check cooling fan

[Shaviro]

CPU is overheating, check cooling fan

Nah. In this case the cpu would burn :P

[Tobester]

my fan has an alarm in case it ever breaks.

which gives me exactly .12433423 seconds to turn my comp off before it explodes.

[BattleCat]

WinXP uses ntfs.

No it doesn't. I have both WinXp and Win98 installed at the same time and they're both on Fat32 harddisks

[Shaviro]

WinXP uses ntfs.

No it doesn't. I have both WinXp and Win98 installed at the same time and they're both on Fat32 harddisks

well, duh. Format your drives, install XP and have a look at it.

[Doom-Child]

XP has FAT support, but the preferred filesystem is NTFS. Mostly because it doesn't suck ass.

DC

[Zaldron]

well, duh. Format your drives, install XP and have a look at it.

No, just run the cmd line and type "convert C: /FS:NTFS"
WinXP will convert from FAT32 to NTFS AFTER rebooting unless it's a drive you can "dismount" temporally (D:, E:, etc).

[Shaviro]

XP has FAT support, but the preferred filesystem is NTFS. Mostly because it doesn't suck ass.

DC

heh. That's another way to put it :P

[DooMBoy]

Dear Lord, something is fucked up bad on your comp.
Thank goodness my computer has a GoBack utility on it. Otherwise, my comp would've fried maybe 5 times by now.

[NightFang]

Goback? Please oh dear god say you're not using a Gateway!

PLEASE!

[DooMBoy]

I shall not say.

[Zaldron]

It IS a Gateway.

XP has its own "GoBack" thinguie. Only that it really works.

[Searcher]

Glad to see it may be fixed. If there are still file issues you can probably use restore to fix them.

[fodders]

If a virus gets saved in restore you're ferked :(

[Lüt]

If a virus gets saved in restore you're ferked :(

Heh, they haven't fixed that since WinME?