Here's my problem: My power supply was starting to go out on my PC (the PSU cooling fan bearings were near death) so I was proactive and replaced the PSU before it failed. While I was shopping for a new PSU I saw a neat case that allowed you to mount your hard drives "sideways" for easy removal/installation (as opposed to my current case which had the normal "front to back" HDD orientation), so I bought that case as well. I took all of the guts from my PC and put them (with the new PSU) in the new case. I double checked all wiring at least four times and I am sure that everything is plugged in where it needs to be. I have built several PCs from scratch and it's not rocket science. Upon bootup, I got excited when it seemed that my BIOS was booting normally. I saw my RA< self-check and all of my IDE drives (two IDE optical drives and two SATA HDDs) were properly detected. When it came time for Windows XP to load, nothing happened at all. No splash screen, nothing. I turned the rig off and back on and this time it got as far as giving me the Windows XP Safe Mode/Normal Mode menu. I selected safe mode . It started displaying all the files that load up for safe mode (as usual) but after about one page of that, the computer rebooted itself! On reboot, I got the Safe Mode menu so I went into safe mode again and the exact same thing happened again. I swapped the OS HDD with my "Data" HDD and now when I boot after all of the BIOS stuff I get a "OS Boot Failure" error (which would expected as that drive has no OS). Whatever is wrong, the system KNOWS that Windows is on the one drive but not the other. I took my OS Drive and put it in an external drive enclosure and hooked it up to my wife's computer. All of the data seemed to be there, and I was able to copy everything I had on the drive that I consider "essential" stuff (pictures, documents, financial stuff etc.) onto my wife's computer. I should have done a CHKDSK at that time, but for whatever reason I didn't bother with it. Now, thinking that I had a corrupted Windows on the HDD, I booted up off my Windows XP installation CD to try to "repair" my Windows installation. It looked like the CD was booting up because I got the normal blue Windows Install CD screen and the status bar on the bottom indicated that it was loading Hardware Abstraction Layers and drivers and stuff from the CD. Anyway, after all the drivers and things finished loading, the blue status screen said "Starting Windows XP" and sat there like that for a longgggggggggg time. Never even got to the menu that would allow me to do a repair of an installation or anything. I tried booting up with the Install CD from my 2nd optical drive and exactly the same thing happened. Anybody have any ideas? I'm stumped! NOTE: I have already done a full CHKDSK (with repair) on the OS HDD and it still has the same problem.
So, nothing has changed apart from the PSU and case? Do both the old and new PSU's have the same ACPI power protocol (not sure how that would cause your present prob but its all i can think of) Maybe check through every BIOS option, if that doesnt work try resetting BIOS to default. Oh and try your old PSU in the new case, it could be that for some reason the new PSU isnt delivering enough charge to the HD's
Correct. As far as I can tell. Done that too. No go. I guess it's worth a shot. Perhaps the PSU was DOA from the store? Could be... I guess if the old PSU works then that would prove it.
Hmmmm Then apart from it being a duff PSU the only other thing i can think of (and this has happened to me) is the mobo is touching the case slightly, somewhere where it shouldn't. If the edge of the mobo touches anything conductive it can make your pc behave really really wierdly. If the old PSU doesnt work and you have nothing left to try, try building the pc out of the case
Ok well none of that worked so I bit the bullet and bought a new Mobo/CPU and RAM. My old shit was an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 1.5GB of DDR400 but now I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 with 2GB of DDR2-PC6400 RAM. I had to format and re-install Windows XP (luckily I had already backup up all of my vital stuff to my wife's computer). Here's the new problem: My WinXP install disk is for SP1 and my HDD is 320GB So naturally now I have one blasted partition thats 137GB and the rest of the HDD is wasted. My question is thus: What program can I use to expand my exisiting OS partition to fit the who HDD without erasing the installion of Windows XP? Or would it be easier to just go buy Windows Vista Home Premium and be done with the whole problem?
Sounds like a corrupted MUP.SYS file... Very often, this file will cause problems when your drive is excessively fragmented...and will resume working after you do a defrag.
No because Windows XP with Service Pack 1 does not recognize the existance of anything over 137GB on one hard drive. Once I update to Service Pack 2 (which is in progress now) I will be able to use the remainder of the HDD but I need to know which program to use to repartition the drive.
Use the windows local drive management. Computer management-- disk management. I use that for all partitioning and formatting
The first thing I think of when a relatively newer computer freezes or reboots itself is overheating. But since you already bought new hardware... It was my understanding that SP1 is what resolved the 137GB barrier. In any case, here's the appropriate MS knowledge base article for this problem.
Jesus, spend thrift, I'm coming over to your house. I just saw this thread and had a similar problem last year. Turned out to be combination of duff stick of memory and over heated Northbridge. Oh well core 2 duo knocks the crap out of AMD right now anyway, so enjoy. Yes, Vista is pretty nice.
Yeah no doubt! Chaos.. please tell me what you think about the release version of Vista, how your computer runs comparatively, etc. If you wouldn't mind that is. I'm going to be upgrading to a C2D here soon, but I also want to upgrade to Vista. I'm thinking I should probably do both at the same time. This way I don't end up re-formatting my HD yet again, if I were to wait to buy it down the road. But if Vista isn't worth it for another year or so, I could wait..
So far the only complaint that I have about Vista is the number of times you get prompted for confirmation EVERY DAMN TIME you want to move a file, delete a file, rename a file or run an executable. I swear that just to delte ONE file you have to say "yes" to THREE different confirmations! Other than that, it's very pretty and seems to run really well. I've only had it for a day now, but that's my initial impression.
