[Help] - WinXP loading problem

[gheron]

Hi Guys, I apologise in advance for what might be a long winded post!

I recently built my own rig

Athlon 64 3500+

Asus A8n-Sli Deluxe

1Gb Corsair

Asus 6600 256Mb

200Gb SATA

20Gb IDE

Anyways, everything was going well with my machine, and then I oticed a noise from the chipset fan, which Asus has confirmed is defective on there A8n board, they offred to send me there updated heatsink/fan but I decided to go for the Zalman Northbridge heatsink everybody was suggesting.

Successfully installed it last night.

Before I got my heatsink, while still using the old one, I noticed that my version of XP on my IDE when booting was hanging with a very faint screen on the winXP logo, then suddenly after 20 seconds it would brighten up and the progress bar would move and boot normally, I just put it down to the chipset overheating with the fan being faulty. It wasnt happening for my SATA install of XP (have a MCE 2005 and SP2 version).

After installing the new Zalman I thought it would be fixed, but now it is happening for both drives. SATA and IDE.

I had thought it could be to do with Micorsoft Media Deskop, wireless keyboard and mouse that I have, it does not seem to work in the bios screen, I cant actually use it untill XP loads. Have tried enabling USB legacy support.

Has anybody got any ideas? If you can be bothered to read this post!!

Cheers

Graeme

Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on.

--Zxian

Edited December 13, 2005 by Zxian

[f14]

You can add a new line with "/SOS" switch in the boot.ini file. This switch causes the names of drivers to be displayed as they load during boot. Maybe you could find the defective driver.

Edited December 14, 2005 by f14

[gheron]

Cheers

I might give that a go and see what is causing it, bet its something to do with nforce4, seem to have nothing but problems with that.

Can you give me a guide on adding that switch in, havent tried anything like that before?

[f14]

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Settings of "Startup and Recovery" -> Click the "Edit" button. When the notepad opens, copy the line like "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect" to a new line, and change to "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional SOS" /SOS". (these digitals maybe are different, copy yours). Then restart. Choose the "Microsoft Windows XP Professional SOS" item as XP begins to boot.

Edited December 14, 2005 by f14