CASE CLOSED: Gateway PC seems hardware locked/won't accept other installations

[Gray_Area]

See below.

[Howard_Casto]

Just a guess, but maybe the drive can't run burned cds? 

Back in the day there were two or three burn formats and some drives were read only. 

The read only drives might read one format, or the other, or neither.  You just don't see this problem on modern pcs anymore because any optical drive other than a blu-ray drive will most likely be writeable, and writeable drives can read all burned formats.

[Eddie_Brock]

It can indeed be the way the disc was burned... You may want to try burning the disc again, however look in the settings for the option to 'make bootable disc'.

If you burned from an image file, it could already be setup to be bootable, if not, then this would be my suggestion.

Also, slower is generally better for burning speeds, fewer errors. 8x is still plenty fast enough for a dvd.

[Gray_Area]

I should clarify:

this is on a late late model P4 3.2ghz HT with an 80gb SATA drive. It came from an office environment.

- the error is actually: 'error booting from CD/DVD drive'

- testing just now, the disc boots fine on my homebuilt PC


I'm thinking there must be something about the Gateway bios, perhaps plus the SATA drive, that is getting in the way of using a non-standard Win disc.

[Drnick]

I would definitely try a different drive in the machine, I had this on a dell machine and even though it would boot from pretty much any other bootable CD it refused to boot from the one I wanted.  (Which of course worked on every other machine around) Swapped drive from another machine and worked fine.  I've also had similar issues on HP Machines at work.  When all else fails I just grab an External DVD Drive and boot from that.

[JohnEDollar]

You could also try "burning" the CD image to another brand of CD, or DVD media.

Manufactures use different colored dyes, when fabricating the blank media.  The lasers in some CD drives are not strong enough, (or accurate enough), to "read" the media surface, due to the variations in the reflected light patterns off the dyed surface.   

For example:  I had an old e-Machines pc that would not detect a bootable, burned, XP OS disc, that was on Sony or Fuji brand blank media.  I burned the image on a Verbatim brand disc, and the disc booted perfectly!   

Worth a shot!   

- John

[Nightbring3r]

You can also try burning at a lower speed. It's not supposed to matter, but some of those older drives seem to work better with a disk burned at 2x or 4x.

[Gray_Area]

Cutting the ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow---:

I pulled the drive from the Gateway, put it in my main machine as the only drive connected, and installed TinyXP. (It had its own installation, I just don't use full XP anymore.)

Then I put that drive back in the Gateway - and half-way through the Windows screen, it blue-screens. This drive is the OEM it came with.

As well, asking the person I bought it from, I got this answer: I wanted to make a "Hackintosh" out of it a one point but had similar issues.

Obviously it's hardware locked or something. So that's the next hurdle.

[Richard_Nixon]

Cutting the ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow---:

I pulled the drive from the Gateway, put it in my main machine as the only drive connected, and installed TinyXP. (It had its own installation, I just don't use full XP anymore.)

Then I put that drive back in the Gateway - and half-way through the Windows screen, it blue-screens. This drive is the OEM it came with.

As well, asking the person I bought it from, I got this answer: I wanted to make a "Hackintosh" out of it a one point but had similar issues.

Obviously it's hardware locked or something. So that's the next hurdle.

You can't do an install in another machine. Lots of drivers don't play well when switched to other hardware. Basically, when the motherboard is changed, youll need to redo the Windows install.

Is there a USB boot option in your BIOS? You could try a memory stick install.

[Gray_Area]

I think it's what I heard people talking about a few years ago, where MS was working with suppliers to hardware lock stuff.

I've heard of this kind of issue, but in the perhaps twenty machines I've self-installed on, some more than once/with different variants of XP, this is the first time I've run into it.

 So, I'm probably going to have to put regular, full XP on there. Could be worse, just wasn't what I wanted.

[404]

I should clarify:

this is on a late late model P4 3.2ghz HT with an 80gb SATA drive. It came from an office environment.

- the error is actually: 'error booting from CD/DVD drive'

- testing just now, the disc boots fine on my homebuilt PC


I'm thinking there must be something about the Gateway bios, perhaps plus the SATA drive, that is getting in the way of using a non-standard Win disc.

does it happen to give you an error number after the error message?

[Gray_Area]

I should clarify:

this is on a late late model P4 3.2ghz HT with an 80gb SATA drive. It came from an office environment.

- the error is actually: 'error booting from CD/DVD drive'

- testing just now, the disc boots fine on my homebuilt PC


I'm thinking there must be something about the Gateway bios, perhaps plus the SATA drive, that is getting in the way of using a non-standard Win disc.

does it happen to give you an error number after the error message?

Nope, that's all it says - instead of 'press enter to boot from CD'.

[Richard_Nixon]

Have you tried switching your CD drive from your working machine to your Gateway machine?

I have never heard of such a lock before. And I've worked on many factory built computers, and have never encountered that. Something doesn't sound quite right. I find it hard to believe they would lock out any boot disks that weren't Gateway branded somehow.

[Drnick]

To be honest in 17Yrs I have never seen a machine hardware locked to stop installation of an OS .  They may lock the disks to only work on 1 type of motherboard, but not the other way round.  I would at first guess say the BSOD is caused by having SATA set to AHCI instead of Standard (or some other similar) But depending on the age of the machine if the motherboard does not have SATA then chances are it has a different chipset to that of the main machine which you installed on.  This would be why it crashes out, you could try booting up into safe mode and removing all chipset and IDE controllers, in fact you could pretty much remove all hardware, then let windows boot and redetect. It is never a good idea with XP to install onto a different machine to the 1 that the drive is going to come from. It just causes too many problems.

[yotsuya]

I had something similar recently where when I would do an install, I would get those 'Could not copy FileX' during install. I did some research, and one suggest was that the memory was bad. I bought two new sticks, and sure enough, it worked. Try swapping RAM if you can.

[Richard_Nixon]

I had something similar recently where when I would do an install, I would get those 'Could not copy FileX' during install. I did some research, and one suggest was that the memory was bad. I bought two new sticks, and sure enough, it worked. Try swapping RAM if you can.

I would run some memory testing programs before going out and buying new ram.

I use memtest86 mostly.  Try a disc from www.ultimatebootcd.com. Its got tons of great boot programs for testing and recovery. Also MS DART/ERD Commander is a great program.

[MonMotha]

FWIW, old (really old - like late 90s) DVD drives can't read CD-Rs.  They CAN, however, read CD-RWs.  Long story short, the CD-R standard and DVD standard were designed around the same time but without knowledge of each other, and they ended up with an incompatibility.  The CD-RW standard, coming about later, resolved the incompatibility with DVD.  So, try a CD-RW.  I know it sounds weird, given that many CD-ROM drives had trouble with CD-RW, but it may help if you've got an old DVD-ROM drive.

There are also several ways to go about making a bootable CD.  The BIOS on the old system may not support them all.  Try the "floppy emulated in RAM" variant.

I've never found a PC that had any sort of locks like you mention, but it's specified as a required feature for Windows 8 compatible systems (there should be a way to disable it on x86 PCs, but it will be forced to be enabled on all Windows 8 ARM machines, and only Microsoft OSes need apply).

[Howard_Casto]

What he said  ^

Then again... it is a Gateway.

That's kind of like when people complain about their AOL not working and I say "Well there's your problem." 

[Gray_Area]

I'll re-state things.

- target PC is a late model P4 HT 3.2ghz

- SATA is main HDD, also has IDE port for HDD

- traget PC and OEM OS booted just fine

- I put in TinyXP disc; got boot error/wouldn't allow disc boot

- checked TinyXP disc in main system (fairly late model P4 HT 2.8ghz with SATA drives): booted to console

- I put OEM XP disc in target PC: booted to console

- I put in a pre-formatted and OS-installed IDE drive in target, and got boot same boot error as above


- I took target PC drive out and put in main system, and using TinyXP disc installed TinyXP onto drive

- I put drive back into target PC: half-way though XP boot screen, blue screen boot error


Conclusion: target PC will not allow booting from non-standard XP installation, nor from non-standard XP disc.


Just now, I put in an old SP2 disc (all I had on hand, burned by a friend, but not trimmed down). It booted to console, I wiped the C partition, and it is half-way through installing full, regular XP.

[Richard_Nixon]

A couple things:
1. You can't swap hard drives from PC to PC and expect it to boot properly. Yes you will get bluescreen errors. That is normal. (Unless the 2 computers happened to be nearly identical.)
2. Did you ever try using a different CD drive to install to target computer?

My conclusion: You simply have a CD drive that will not read that particular disk, not purposefully. Many times I have encountered a single burnt CD that can be read in one machine and not another. Yet both machines can and will read burnt CDs normally. For one reason or another it refuses to load from that particular disk, I have always solved it by burning another copy, perhaps with slightly different settings/different program.

I actually have a cd-burner in one of my older machines that basically burns CDs that only it can read. None of my other 5+ computers can read the disks that thing will make. It was a really strange and fustrating situation.

Another situation I recently encountered was when I was repairing an HP laptop for a customer. The thing wouldn't boot from any OS disk I have (Like 10-15 different CDs and getting the same error as you mention) I ended up swapping the CD drive with another one, booted to install, installed fine. I swapped the "defective" CD drive back in, and it started to read my OS CDs just fine. Another very strange situation.

[Gray_Area]

Well, it's a done deal, now. I have full, regular XP SP3 on there (from a fresh copy I just made - though had to look up the ethernet driver, and port over with a usb drive), and it's all fine now. I was starting to look over in the corner at my ten pound sledge.....    CASE CLOSED.

[MacGyver]

I was hoping to ring in before, but here it is.

I used to work for Gateway when that machine was new, and I can tell you they don't lock anything, however, as stated above the drives were picky about certain colors of CDRs, and harddrive controllers, so most likely you simply need to slip-stream the "DOS" (dos setup) version of your harddrive controller and the "Windows" driver into your tiny XP disc before loading.  Basically "pretend" you have a SCSI drive, and lookup the instructions for remastering an XP disc with those "SCSI" drivers slip-streamed in.  Realize that by "SCSI" I mean either your IDE or SATA ACHI drivers needed for that motherboard.

The blue screen is from either wrong/missing harddrive controller drivers or bad ram, the 0x? number on the blue screen will point you in the right direction.  Also you might be able to get out of the whole "slip-streaming" thing by simply putting your disk controller in the BIOS to "legacy mode" or "IDE mode" instead of "SATA" or "Native AHCI".

Also, it is possible to load XP onto an other machine and move it over, but it requires you to manually install the proper HAL files for the hardware (vista and win7 do it on the fly now).

I would repair and reload up to 50 machines a day at the Gateway Country Store, 8 at a time, for 8 hours a day, and have never seen a "locked" Gateway.

[Gray_Area]

I would repair and reload up to 50 machines a day at the Gateway Country Store, 8 at a time, for 8 hours a day, and have never seen a "locked" Gateway.

Mmmm. As I used regular XP on the machine for a week or so, it seems most likely the issue is drivers as you explained. A hassle. I replaced the machine with a Gigabyte 945 mobo PC (which I got for 25 bucks without an HDD; no less that with 500mb less ram, is snappier!), and am relegating this one to cab duty. Thank you, though.

[Gray_Area]

Found another gateway machine that wouldn't allow tinyxp but was fine with a regular xp disc. Machines seems snappy, though.