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CoreyPK

Please help lol

I'm installing (well trying to) XP Pro on a friends old HP machine. It just keeps rebooting on me over and over when I try to do so. Here's what I've done:

Initially I just tried to install it from the cd by booting from the XP cd, no go, it just kept rebooting over and over, corrupted his old OS (Windoes ME).

I tested the Ram with Hirams Boot Disk 8.2 or whatever it is, and his RAM failed the diagnostics. So i figured fine, it's his RAM. So I got him to get some new RAM.

Ok, so he got the new Memory (SDRAM PC133 512MB) and I put it in, everything worked fine for a while, copied all the XP files over and started to install XP, then in the middle of installing it, the system started rebooting over and over again, each time restarting the installation til it finally wouldn't even restart the installation anymore.

I ran a HD diagnostic, says it failed. So I put in an older hard drive I had laying around, it was even worse.

So I put his original HD in, and am now running a RAM diagnostic on the brand new RAM he got. It's coming up failing. So now I'm thinking the old ram was good, it's just got to be something else.

What could it be?? Hard drive? Motherboard? What?

For the record, his system was running fine, however he wanted to upgrade his machine, and he said that sometimes programs were crashing on him recently.

Any ideas? Any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks!!

Corey

Hengis

Welcome to the forum. It seems like the common denominator could well be the motherboard. In fact the test that you ran may be saying that the RAM is faulty because of this fault on the motherboard. Can you test the RAM on another PC?

CoreyPK

Thanks for the reply!

Yes I'm thinking that the RAM slots may be bad, or it's the board itself, however it was running for quite a while with no major issues. But that can be common I think.

I'll can't see the 512mb stick being bad since it's brand new. The older sticks I can cuz well...they're old. lol.

The diagnostic program also gave me a faulty HD error, yet I have the drive hooked up to my machine on it and it seems to run fine. I ran a disk check on it through the Disk Management in XP Pro, and it didn't give me any errors as of yet.

CoreyPK

ok so i took the HD out of the machine and hooked it up to my own, partitioned/formatted the drives. Now I just booted up again, got through the XP setup screen, everything was going ok, it got to the Installing Windows section, then it BSoD'd on me and gave me a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION

any idea?

Hengis

Do you have an NForce chipset on your motherboard? If you do then this post @ the NVIDIA forums could help you:

1. Make sure your power supply is not overloaded. Even if it is a 550W and your system only needs 350W, make sure that the 12V rail supports at least 25W (especially if you are using an SLI board with 2 cards or a haus graphics card).

2. Run MEMTEST86 for at least two passes (99% of the time, if it passes twice, the memory is perfectly fine). If the memory is showing errors, first try the following before replacing it:

Increase the memory voltage in the Bios by .1V or .2V (start out with .1). Run Memtest again; if it passes this time, you are fine. My memory was not showing errors, but I increased the voltage by .1V and it fixed the problem for me.

3. If something is overclocked, set it back to norms. This error can be caused by a ****** off CPU (overheating or just generally disgruntled). If not, flash your BIOS to the latest version.

4. Remove and/or disable any wireless cards or devices in your system.

5. Uninstall all Nvidia drivers on your system (chipset and graphics). When reinstalling the drivers, DO NOT install the IDE SW driver. Make sure your system is still working at this point by rebooting. If so, install the 77.XX Nvidia graphics drivers if you have an Nvidia card, and work your way up to the 9XXX series until you find instability.

6. Disable your IDE channels in the bios. This problem has been known to occur due to DVD and CDROM IDE conflicts.

7. In XP or x64, go to Start -- Control Pannel -- System -- Advanced -- Performance -- and click "adjust for best performance".

CoreyPK

Thanks for the tip. I took out his video card (Diamond S80) and put in an older AGP card i had, it got further in the XP install than ever before, but still got a Machine_Check_Exception.

As for his BIOS...it doesn't give me an option to change the power settings that I can fine.

Hengis

Ok, try the process again but this time remove & unplug everything apart from your mobo/psu/cpu/video card/1 hard drive and 1 memory stick.