XP Home Boot problem

[montgomery]

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?

[tarquel]

Hello fellow welsh person and welcome to MSFN.

Am I right in thinking that he bought a XP Upgrade CD pack, instead of a OEM CD pack?

In either case, while upgrading from ME to XP may have worked, when changing the motherboard, I've noticed from the specs of either motherboard that the chipset [as you would expect] vary significantly, and this will ultimately be the reason XP has stopped booting up.

An in-place repair of windows [which is what was suggested by the colleague of his] *can* work sometimes, but more often then not - especially in this set of vastly different changes - it was doomed to fail I think

I would say that his best is to take the HDD out and either put it in a external USB caddy, or mount it as a slave drive in a working pc, so that he can get all the stuff off it he wants, as unless you are all prepared to put alot of work into it [which still may not work at the end of it], it will likely never boot again until he wipes it clean and starts with a fresh install of XP.

If you want a chat on messenger, just send me a message [although make it later as currently I have no messenger access at work]

Regards

Nath.

[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?

[tarquel]

Hi again.

Havent got the time at the moment to answer you fully on this one - about to go and finish building a Core 2 Duo beast of a computer for a graphic designer / friend of mine - but I will say that like I said, because of the radically different hardware, chipse & CPU, I highly doubt its possible to achieve option 3.

Option 2 is feasible [i've never - that I remember - actually upgraded a OS to XP, so I'm not sure whether exactly how it works]. If the XP Upgrade CD boots, then it should be the best bet, although you will need some 3rd party program to repartition further and squeeze / move things around to free up enough space.

Option 1 may work, but will likely cause you problems down the way and further.

Another option is to get hold of the Windows ME media - providing the machine in question has a COA attached to the chassis or with the manuals / CDs - and then you could install Windows ME cleanly, and then perform the upgrade

I'll be back later.

Regards

Nath.

[IcemanND]

Try the repair first. not the repair from the first screen when you boot from the XP CD which only takes you to the repair console. You wan to select to do an install and let it detect if an os is already installed and then prompt if you wish to repair that installation. Select repair and it should replace the HAL with the correct one and install the correct device drivers for your hard disk controller. You will need to reinstall updates and possibly other hardware drivers but should be good to go. If this doen't work either install to another hard drive and install this one as a secondary drive so he can access the data, or back up the data and install fresh. Though with an upgrade cd you will need qualifying previous version windows media to do a full reinstall.

[tarquel]

Thanks Iceman.... but he's already tried the Repair option..

And yep, I've mentioned the problem of not having the Windows ME media

But yes, the best way is a clean install indeed.

Nath.