XP fighting me, new install - Success

[squirrellydw]

I have never had a problem before installing an OS and now XP wants to fight me.  I am trying to install XP Home edition on my cab and it keeps freezing up, any idea? 

Installing it on a SATA 320 gig HD
and using the AVGA PCI-e video card

Fresh install

[BobA]

Might be the sata drivers.

To quote:
Some computers contain motherboards that support Serial ATA (SATA) hard drivers. The motherboards may have a separate dedicated SATA controller. You can determine if your computer has a dedicated chipset during the POST because a second screen may appear identifying the SATA hard drives.

When you install Windows XP, you may need to inform setup that your SATA hard drives are on a separate controller. You can do this during the text mode phase of setup by pressing F6 when prompted to install additional drivers. Then insert the floppy disk containing the SATA controller drivers. If you don’t supply the drivers, Windows setup may stop indicating that it cannot locate any hard drives.

The procedure for installing the SATA controller drivers during setup is as follows. As soon as the setup of Windows begins, a prompt will appear at the bottom of the screen to press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID drive. Setup will prompt you for the drivers which should be available on a floppy disk that came with the motherboard. Insert the disk into the floppy disk drive and press “S” to continue. Setup will look for the drivers on the floppy and present you with a list. Select the appropriate driver and press Enter. You will then be able to proceed with the installation of Windows XP.

[squirrellydw]

no floppy but I have a CD, but  Idon't think I can take the XP CD out. 

I think it might be the MOBO, it just froze when I was in the bios and I am not always getting a video signal to the monitor.

[Loki]

I've seen this problem before... PC froze up during the install.
I think it was something with the memory.

[squirrellydw]

I've seen this problem before... PC froze up during the install.
I think it was something with the memory.

might be right, took our one dimm and its working so far

[squirrellydw]

grrrr, just froze again

[Hoopz]

Did you wipe the hard drive?  If you didn't do a full erase and it had SP2 on it, it may be that you are trying to install using a non-SP2 version.  I spent hours at work trying to resolve a problem like this.  XP constantly cause blue screens during the install.  I finally found an article about it in the windows knowledge base.  I was dealing with XP Pro, but it could be a problem that XP home has also.

If you can't get it to work, I would at least investigate something like this.

[squirrellydw]

yeah, wiped it clean and no luck.  No blue screen just freezes.  I thought I had it working when I removed one DIMM but it froze with 16 minutes left.  Going to send back the ram and get what the MOBO recommends.

[squirrellydw]

just ordered new RAM, lets hope that fixes it, if not the MOBO is going back.

And this was suppose to be the easy part 

[patrickmaher]

Did you have a internal PC speaker attached to the motherboard? This would have plugged in to a 4 pin header near where the power button for the computer case plugs in, or sometimes the speaker is built in. If you did have it connected you would have heard a single beep everytime you turned on the computer.

I think it might be the MOBO, it just froze when I was in the bios and I am not always getting a video signal to the monitor.

If the video does not come on you normally would hear beeps from the internal speaker indicating either video card or RAM. If the internal speaker was plugged in but no beeps were heard it would be the motherboard or something plugged into the motherboard.

If no beeps are heard the best thing to do is to remove everything from the motherboard except for power and CPU. Remove RAM, video, SATA/IDE drive cables, add on cards, etc. Then power on the computer. If the internal speaker is functioning you should hear error beeps indicating no RAM or no video, if no beeps are heard then almost always the motherboard is bad. Bad CPU is much less common but can cause the same symptoms.

Because the computer does boot up and then freezes later it may take some time to diagnose in this way.

After it froze with 1 stick of RAM removed, did you trying removing the one it froze with and putting back the one you originally removed?

If you feel it is the RAM you can run memtest http://www.memtest.org

Does the motherboard have onboard video?

[squirrellydw]

thanks, but  I took the easy way out and returned the RAM and MOBO and sold the CPU.  I did not have a speaker attached, don't have one.  I did try both sticks of memory.  The MOBO does not have onboard video.

[squirrellydw]

I have all my new crap now, going to try again tomorrow and hook up my cab speakers to the mobo.  I have built over 100 PCs, this was suppose to be the easy part.  wish we luck

[loadman]

I have never had a problem before installing an OS and now XP wants to fight me.  I am trying to install XP Home edition on my cab and it keeps freezing up, any idea? 

Installing it on a SATA 320 gig HD
and using the AVGA PCI-e video card

Fresh install

It's a long shot..     But try swapping your mouse and keyboard around (each other port) and start again  (I had a similar issue 2 years back)

[youki]

Try to install it with another Video card. Remove your AVGA , put another VGA card.

Once, your XP runs . 

Put you desktop in 640x480  standard VGA.

Change the video card

Plug your PC on your cab

Start in Safe mode  640x480

Install arcade VGA drivers.

Then reboot.

[squirrellydw]

woohoo, it worked.  Must have been the RAM or MOBO.  Now to install the drivers for the AVGA and install XP updates

edit........71 updates for XP

[2600]

woohoo, it worked.  Must have been the RAM or MOBO.  Now to install the drivers for the AVGA and install XP updates

edit........71 updates for XP

Decided not to follow the sticky?

Drew has a nice thread describing how to put all your updates, configure windows, add drivers, and add applications on your XP CD using nlite.

[squirrellydw]

maybe later, had to make sure i could get this installed