Copy XP CDROM to Hard Drive?

[Bytes Back]

Erm, dont suppose a duff keyboard could be causing the prob ?

 

[CEichhorn]

Into the phone booth for a quick change...

Time to get tough with this.

Stand by.....

 

[CEichhorn]

Progress!

I looked for newer drivers. All of the devices had drivers on the XP CDROM, but Update updated one of them (ESS sound card.)

I looked around for a new video driver (nVidia RIVA TNT2-64) and found the current unified driver set at nVidia.

First, I went back to the default BIOS. This added the LPT and COM2 back in. XP found them and booted correctly! (It had refused to do so before....)

Then it crashed on the next boot, as usual.

I went into SafeBoot and installed the new driver from nVidia.

Rebooted normally and seems OK.

Yeah, I've been here before..... We'll see after a hundred reboots from every situation.

Stand by.



Asus P3B-F
P3-450
1283 Mushkin PC133
nVidia Riva TNT2 64
ESS 1989 Sound
Netgear 311 NIC
PCTel winmodem
PS2 KB/Logitech trackball
WinXP Pro Upgrade

 

[CEichhorn]

BAck to the future...

Hangs again. It seems to work once or twice when a new device is added, but then reverts within a few boots.

I notice there is no IRQ 02 listed anywhere in System Innformation, etc. That seems odd. I don't see much on the web about IRQ 2. Supposed to be the interrupt controller. Can't imagine where mine went....

Hmmmmm.

CLE

 

[CEichhorn]

SOLVED!

How annoying!!!

Stripped the system down and eventually replaced the video card. Voila! No more problems.

The video adapter was an IO Magic version of the nVidia Riva TNT2-64 (32Mb). It was recognized by the original XP CDROM, and it passed the compatibility tet. It accepted the latest updated drivers from nVidia. And it appeared perfectly normal. Therewas never a hint that the vid card was a problem.

But changing it out solved everything. NO crashes. NO hangs. Quicker.

How weird? Perhaps the card is defective in some subtle way.

BTW, in the course of making al these step-by-step changes to nail it down, I reverted to booting from the XP CDROM and installing from therre, rathe rthan from a folder on the HDD. A bonus from all the changing around was that I got the cluster size back up. It had been set to 512 when the FAT32-NTFS conversion took place first time around.

So now it's perfectly happy, EXCEPT that it won't accepteither ofthe two PC100 DIMMs I bought for it. No problem with PC133 Mushkin. Strange. Easy solution though - just don't use the PC100! (Generic junk perhaps.)

End of story.