montgomery

Thanks for your response to the problem I posted on MSFN. As you can imagine, once I was aware of my friend’s problem I searched high and low over the internet for a solution. Many of the fora I entered seemed to have long meaningless strings of responses which all eventually left the subject matter altogether. On none of these fora did I find an answer in which I could put my faith. It did become obvious that there was a very high probability of driver conflict. As a consequence, I endeavoured to identify the drivers associated with the former motherboard, chipset and CPU, with the intention of removing or renaming them, so that the drivers for the new motherboard, chipset and CPU could have an opportunity of working. My search on this front has not been very successful. Perhaps, if I give you the full picture you may be able to help me further. My friend bought his original computer from Evesham in 2000. It had a 16Gb drive and 32Mb Ram, and was getting progressively slower. He upgraded his hard drive to 200Gb but only partitioned the first 80Gb. Using the Utility XXCopy he migrated his Windows ME system and all data files from his original 16Gb drive to his new hard drive (I have used this excellent utility and thoroughly recommend it!). All was OK. His ME system worked as before, but faster. As he had heard that Microsoft would not be supporting Windows ME he bought a Windows Home upgrade from PC World, and after some help from Microsoft and a few friends his new XP system worked as fast as it could with the outdated motherboard, chipset and CPU. Thus we arrive at his present predicament. I have considered a number of alternatives but wanted to be sure of what the present problems comprised before proceeding. These alternative are: 1. To create a new directory on C: called, say, “XPSystem” and to load XP into this directory and endeavour to run XP from there. Never having done this previously, I was not sure whether there would be any software conflicts. Perhaps you can advise? 2. To partition the hard drive further and to install XP on another logical drive. I have the same queries as above. 3. To locate and remove the conflict causing drivers in DOS. I note your suggestion of extracting all the data and programs from my friend’s hard drive wiping it clean and then reinstalling XP. The problem I perceive with this solution is that his XP CD is an upgrade and would expect to find an earlier version of Windows installed on the drive. He doesn’t have ME because Evesham provide only a recovery CD, also which presumably contains only drivers for his Evesham computer. Also, I know my friend has bought a lot of his software as downloads, without backup CDs and he would have to pay for this software again. I am surprised that some enterprising software house hasn’t written a recovery package, which identifies the conflicts within Windows and provides remedies. Perhaps, there is such a package. Are you aware of one, may I ask?

1. A friend has upgraded his motherboard and CPU from a Gigabyte GA-7S748 SKTA motherboard with an AMD Athlon Palamino 2600+ to a an ASRock AM2NF6G-VSTA motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3200 processor. 2. Earlier he had upgraded his OS from Windows Millennium to Windows XP Home SP2. After the OS upgrade the system worked fine, but rather slowly, hence the need for the hardware upgrade. 3. Since the hardware upgrade, his system has refused to boot. 4. Originally, in attempting to run in “safe mode” the screen would list a series of drivers loaded ending in: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\gagp38kx.sys after which it would allow him into "safe mode". 5. A colleague of his suggested that he boot using the XP CD and that when he obtained the Setup menu, he should he should hit ENTER to install Windows and at the next screen press R to effect a repair. 6. He is now unable to boot into “safe mode” getting the error message “Windows XP Setup cannot run under Safemode. Setup will restart now. 7. When Setup restarts it continues the rebooting loop or crashes displaying the blue screen and technical message: ***STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0xF7657750, 0xF78A2430, 0xF78A212C). He has asked me, as a friend and “so called computer buff” to assist him. So far I have been totally unable to get the computer to boot. Please can anyone help?