| Author |
Message |
Adam Burns
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 9:06 am: | |
It began with my system not being able to boot due to a BIOS incompatibility issue. Then, after some mistakes and such, I ended up replacing my motherboard, video card, and hard drive. My system is now running an Athlon XP 1800 on an MSI KT400 board, with 256mb of PC2100 RAM, an ATI Radeon 9500 PRO, Western Digital Special Edition HD 80GB, TDK 32x burner, toshiba DVD-ROM drive, and some other random peripherals.
When I first installed the board, I put in a few extra mounting posts for support, unwittingly shorting out the board. THe people i talked to said it seemed to work fine and past its POST, but there was no way to tell if it worked ok. So, I started to set up Windows XP Home edition build 2600 (I am only pretty sure on the build, its the very first generation of XP Home, I had it a few days before it was technically realeased to the public) and windows had repeated errors copying files during setup, it would tell me either that it could not copy the file, or that the windows XP image that setup put on my hard drive was invalid. A friend of mine reccomended that I re-partition the drive in adition to re-formatting. That seemed to work. After a while, the computer began to continually start up with an error, usually pertaining to the ATI driver, which are known to often be unstable. I would also get lots of memory errors, taht I did not exactly recognize (usually given in hex). After getting rid of some MSI software which I had had some trouble with before, it appeared to work ok.
But then, while playing a video game, the screen began to have major problems, I attributed this to the video cards instabiliyt, restarted, and everything was ok. It happened one more time, and then I could not booth the OS all the way. I got it to boot once or twice in safe mode, but it alwasy ended up crashing before I could get anywhere.
Eventually, I switched out my ATI card for an old PCI video card I had lying around. No effect. So I figured that i would reformat and setup windows again, this time getting the motherboards AGP driver installed, and then putting in the new card, like the manual recommeded, and not installing any of hte unstable MSI system monitoring software.
I first tried to repair my installation, but it had the same error copying to hte drive as it had had the first time I tried to install XP. So I re-partitioned the drive, formatted the primary partitino with NTFS, and started to install windows. No luck, thought that it might be the fried board. So I used my old board, disabled the service that my bios did not support in xp setup, began setup, reveived an error that it failed to install the "product catalogs", and that this was a fatal error. The log file said it was error code fffffe0b, and message number 0xfffffe0b (the latter is in the MS KnowledgeBase).
Do you have any suggestions for narrowing down the various possible devices that could be causing this\these problems? I am unsure how to continue troubleshooting. Ask any questions you need to, sorry this was so long. |
E.S.
| | Posted on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 8:19 pm: | |
Have your memory tested. |
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