Pragma

Or: I'll bet Geek Squad couldn't fix this...

My girlfriend's parents had Windows 98 on their computer, and they recently purchased an iPod to discover it doesn't play nicely with Win98. So they asked me to help them upgrade to the modern world. Their computer was pretty good - a friend of a friend built it for them back in 99 or 00, it was top of the line then. A P3 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM, etc.

They'd gone ahead and gotten a copy of XP Professional, so I helped them back up all of their data and then gladly volunteered my time to help format the machine and then install XP, figuring it shouldn't be too difficult. Boy was I wrong.

The installer went fine - it formatted the harddrive, copied the files over, rebooted, and ran through XP's graphical installer. Then it rebooted to go into Windows. While at the XP loading screen, it locked up the computer. Power button, reboot into safe mode. Safe mode worked - but couldn't really figure out what was wrong. Did this a few times to ensure that there was something going wrong in the "normal" mode of XP stopping the machine from loading.

I figured it was probably a third party driver, as I'd run Memtest86 and ensured there was no bad RAM. I downloaded all of the updated drivers for their video card, sound card, etc. - still no luck. At this point, I was getting very frustrated - and didn't have a clue. So I started turning on all of the event logs and snooping around to see what the problem was.

I noticed a strange error in the system event log, noting how the ACPI BIOS was attempting to write to bad memory segments and the OS was punishing it (I'd post the actual error message, but I forgot it - I may have it at home). I searched around on Google and the general response to that message was that the BIOS on the motherboard was too old and was using an outdated control language that was incompatible with XP.

Thankfully, the motherboard wasn't a noname (A-Bit VH6T) and I found an update for it. Reflashed the BIOS, and everything worked. The error message went away, Windows booted up properly, etc. I've installed XP hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, on all sorts of outdated hardware. Hell, I even installed it on an old Pentium 133MHz laptop. I've never before seen that error message - or heard of a BIOS needing to be updated to support XP. But now I have - and I won't forget that lesson any time soon.

Anyone else ever had weird problems like this installing XP/any OS? I'm always interested in learning from others' pain

__________________
Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

God of Thunder

Haven't experienced it myself, but have heard about it through the grapevine.

Thanks for pointing out your experience, it helps techs like myself keep our knowledgebase up.

PS, I always wondered what would happen if Micro$soft would strat having to put legal disclaimers on their products like the drug companies.

This product may not work with older BIOS, video cards, etc...)

__________________
I reject your reality, and substitute my own

-- Adam Savage

nick9871

I have ran across a similar problem at work. On older generation Dell Gx1's you have to disable some very, very random settings like advanced power management or else xp will not boot. I have not dealt with one of these in a while so i forgot the exact settings though, so dont take my word for that one ha ha.

alpha phi

I have a P II that won't accept XP
I tells me right from the get go
I put in the disk
it scans
A box pops up and says
not compatable click to exit.

__________________

sailor

Wow, never heard of that. Thanks for the tip, doubt I ever would have thought to try that...

__________________
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
--Plato

flat5

tnx for the "head's up"

Pragma

Wow, I've never heard of ones like that. Even the original pentium chips take XP. My guess is that it's some other piece of hardware causing the problem, most likely the motherboard by way of the BIOS. But yea, that was a fun headscratcher that I'm very glad I solved.

__________________
Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!