Please Help! XP Pro Installation Problems!!

D

Deversol

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I have spent several days trying to get XP installed on my system, to no avail.

I have an Asus A7v133 mobo with a 1.3GHz Athlon, and am installing XP on a WD SE 80gb hard drive formatted in NTFS. I also have 768MB of Crucial PC133 CL2 SDRAM, a Leadtek GeForce4 Ti4400, and a Mitsumi CD-ROM.

I booted with the XP cd and setup started. After it copied the temporary files from the CD, I got a message saying "Setup is Starting Windows" and it just hangs there...I had moved the hard drive from master to slave, and from the primary to secondary IDE port and get the same result...I have removed all but one RAM chip, removed the sound card, ethernet card, everything but the video card, hard drive, and CD-ROM. I had also installed an old GeForce2 32MB card instead of the GeForce4. I have also flashed the BIOS to the latest version on the Asus site, ver. 1009, and get the same result no matter what.

I then put the hard drive in my roommate's computer and was able to get XP completely installed on that hard drive with no problems. I then put that hard drive in my PC, as the master drive, and set up BIOS so that it will boot from there first....I then get an error during boot-up saying something like "Disk read error, press ctrl+alt+delete to reboot"...I can understand that, the HAL is all messed up, but it was installed on my roommate's PC with no problems, meaning that the hard drive is fine.

I had also installed Win2k Pro on that same hard drive in my PC with the same hardware configuration as above, and had no problems. Then, while in Windows 2k, I inserted the Windows XP cd and started installing it. After the files were copied from the CD, XP rebooted my system. During reboot, the black Windows XP screen came up saying it was loading, and it just froze. I tried to reboot several times and it did the same thing each time. Then, I booted from the Windows XP cd and started to install it again. Once the files were copied from the CD, a message at the bottom of the screen said something like "Setup is Starting Windows" and it just hangs there...

I had also used the official XP boot disks available from Microsoft. After all of the drivers are copied, I get the "Setup is Starting Windows" message.

I have also replaced my GeForce card with an old SiS PCI video card and get the same result. I have tried just one RAM chip (tried all three) in all three different slots...same thing...

Ive tried formatting the drive in FAT, FAT32, as well as NTFS....

Ive also tried to load BIOS defaults and get the same result...

Last but not least, I copied all of the files from the i386 directory to my hard drive, booted with a Win98 floppy into DOS, and ran Setup from there....same result as above...

I feel like I have tried everything possible to get XP installed. Can anyone think of anything else I can try? Ive been at this for days now with no luck...Thankfully I still have Win2k installed on another hard drive so I can still use my computer....

Any ideas? Thanks for any assistance!
 
One thing I did notice is that when the computer freezes up at either the black Windows XP screen (prior to installation) or when it freezes at "Setup is starting Windows", the LEDs on my keyboard go out...so I suppose the keyboard is dying...could it have something to do with the PS/2 keyboard port? I have the Microsoft Internet keyboard...would it be possible to hook it up to either a serial port or a USB port?

Anyone have any other ideas?
 
Video cards can be a problem.. can you borrow an older card like TNT2 Ultra from someone for the install? I found that XP wouldn't install with my Geforce2 MX 400 installed.. when I installed my TNT2 Ultra it worked fine..
 
Thanks for the reply RobbieSan. I thought that as well... so I did hook up an old SiS PCI video card, and the same thing happened :(

Any other ideas anyone?
 
Deversol,

I had probs installing WinXP similar to u.

I tried everything then by sheer fluke I dropped my FSB ratio in bios from

133:133:33
to
100:100:33

and wadda ya know it worked

good luck.
 
Hrmm, thats pretty strange, but Ill try that tonight....thanks!!
 
Yes very strange but it worked.
I tested it 3 x's to make sure it was nothing else.

My system at the time =

Mobo - Asus CUSL-2C
CPU - PIII 1GHz
Ram - 256Mb Kingmax PC133SDRAM
Video - Leadtek Geforce 2 MX 32Mb
H/D - Quantum Fireball 13G
CDRW - Sony 32X8X4
 
Yes very strange but it worked.
I tested it 3 x's to make sure it was nothing else.

My system at the time =

Mobo - Asus CUSL-2C
CPU - PIII 1GHz
Ram - 256Mb Kingmax PC133SDRAM
Video - Leadtek Geforce 2 MX 32Mb
H/D - Quantum Fireball 13G
CDRW - Sony 32X8X4

cheers
 
768MB of Crucial PC133 CL2 SDRAM


I think that's your problem, try to install XP with only 1 mem module in your system
 
Ive tried putting just one of each of the chips into each of the slots and get the same result :(
 

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