dusty2all

It will not power up. No fans, nothing. I have checked all the relevant cables and nothing has changed. I will see if I can find a power button on the board. It happens to be a Gigabyte M61P-S3. You need a microscope to see the pins and the connector for the on / off. I was surprised I ever got it to work in the first place. I swapped the cables back and that did not solve the problem. I have thread going on the Gigabyte board as well. My experience with XP partitioning was disastrous. Never again. Of course, that is just MY experience. It might work for other people.

UPDATE: Well, I swapped the locations of the SATA cables on the motherboard and now my computer won't start! I checked my connector to the on / off switch and it appears to be fine, then I looked at the connector to the switch itself and nothing had changed there. This is strange and getting stranger.

I get that dialog with an addendum that there must be formatted space on the 500 GB in order to install the operating system on the 320. I will try it again after I switch the SATA cables (per Ponch) and if that doesn't solve the problem I can make note of exactly what that screen says when I get to it. I am reinstalling XP this morning. Yes. It was the secondary drive on my other computer. Whatever was on the drive was formatted away--actually Partition Magic blew it away--and there are now four newly created partitions, all of which XP sees when I try to install it. What do you mean by "select to format it?" Are you talking about the screen where it gives the option format it NTFS or leave the drive alone? It was formatted NTFS by my partitioning program. I always let XP do NTFS its own way and there has never been any problem with it completing properly. I don't let XP create partitions. though. I have had all sorts of grief when I did that.

You probably need to create a primary partition on that drive then reboot so it takes the C letter or maybe swap your SATA cables so that the 320Gig comes first. Ponch - A primary partition on which drive? The 500? There is a 10 GB partition there. The other 99% of that drive is unformatted. The 320 has four primary partitions. I can easily swap the SATA cables on the motherboard so I will do that first. Thanks for the response.

LOL! I might consider stopping by this forum on occasion just to see if you have found yourself! OK. I put together a new improved nLite install disk and it actually did what it was supposed to. The password problem went away as well. Other weirdness is going on, however. This might be a question for one of the Microsoft forums but perhaps someone here has had the same thing happen. I have two hard drives, a 320 and a 500 GB. The one I want to install XP on is the 320, but both times I have tried to install from an nLite CD, XP puts the C drive on the 500 GB, with the message that unless there is a formatted partition on that drive, it will not install everything else on the 320. So apparently it is booting from the 500 GB drive - C - in order to start the operating system on the 320 GB drive - D. I can't figure this out. I want this entire operating system on the C drive. Do I have to disconnect my 500 GB drive to convince XP to make that happen? Has anyone else here had this same problem? Please advise. Thanks.

I laughed when I read that. Thanks for the amusement! I am in the middle of downloading service packs and assorted other odds and ends. Hopefully I won't have to bother you again when I try this a second time. John, you have been more than kind, and I was pleasantly surprised that you took the time to respond to my last message. BTW, when are you going to fill out your profile? I don't even know what country you are in.

I guess I was being irrationally hopeful but it seemed entirely feasible to me that limited tweaking of an existing file could be possible. Due to some partitioning problems I had yesterday, I lost all of the files that I used to build the first nLite install. It took me a full day to put it together the first time and I wanted to make sure that was absolutely necessary before I put myself through that entire process again. CDs are cheap. Fortunately. I don't think I can handle another learning curve at the moment and virtual systems are something I have never experimented with. At any rate, my opinion has not changed that nLite is one remarkable system tool. I read as much as I could find on it before I built that nLite install but apparently I had not read quite enough. Lesson learned. What did we ever do without forums like this one? Thanks again for your patience and your information.

Thank you for a most informative response. I want to make sure I know how to proceed. Am I working with my existing nLite CD? In that case I would copy all of the files that are on that CD to my hard drive. Then I would edit and burn a new CD, reformat the partition and reinstall. Is that correct? Or am I starting over? If I am using the existing CD, I am a little unclear where the hotfixes are. I am having a hard time finding them. The same goes for the .NET stuff. Then...how do I move the IE7 updates so they install after IE7 itself does? Or should I just blow away the IE 7 updates? Sorry for all the questions. I haven't quite figured out how nLite does what it does yet. I think I would have the option of adding those only if I start over. If that is not the case and I can add it to the existing nLite install, how do I go about that? In the meantime, I will go over to the RyanVM forum and look around. That is where I got SP3 to begin with. I greatly appreciate your help.

The XP disk I started with was XP SP2 Home. All of the work was done in one session. I have attached the Last Session.ini. It is doing something different now that I started the new computer this morning. There is the logo page and then the light blue screen with this message at the top: setup is being restarted... That is the same as it was last night. Now there is a third step that happens sometimes but not all the time. That is a blank light blue screen, then a box with an error message appears. It goes by so fast that all I can read is the first word or two. Something about Insufficient resources. I mention this because I started to get into Safe Mode, where I would get the usual page of all the files that were loading, then it went to that light blue screen and that same error message. I wish I could get the code on the message but it doesn't appear that there is a code on it, just two lines of text. Now I just watched it again, and there is only one line of text. The next time there is no box with an error message - it just reboots. Really strange. Any idea what is going on here? LAST_SESSION.INI

Hello! Thanks for the prompt response. Yes, I did. That is how it works with my other computer. I am not sure what I selected. Fortunately, it wouldn't be a big deal if I have to do that.

I made my first nLite CD for a new computer I am building - XP SP3 optimized for pro audio. The install seemed pretty unremarkable until it rebooted my computer after it was complete. Now it goes round and round. The usual Microsoft Windows XP big logo with the copyright notice, then it goes to a light blue screen with the following message: Setup is being restarted. After a few seconds it reboots. It has been doing this for the last couple hours. I thought, no big deal, just insert my regular XP install disk and use recovery console. Big problem. The recovery console is requiring a password. I never provided one when I built the nLite install. I even went to the .ini files on the CD I created and that confirmed that I never gave a password. I don't have one on my other computer either. So...is there some sort of default password that nLite uses when no password is typed in when you choose your nLite options? I can't get into recovery console, so I can't fix the boot or do anything else to clean up this install. I am thinking there has to be some kind of simple workaround for this. Any help would be much appreciated. I sure don't want to go back to a standard XP install after I spent so much time and effort setting up an nLite version. Please advise! Thanks.