Windows XP will not load-- but not XP's Fault!

Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own wayNaples, FL Icrontian
edited October 2003 in Science & Tech
Here is an interesting one-- customer wants a machine upgraded to 1 GB of DDR333 and XP reloaded as it is corrupt (FUBARRED beyond belief). He also wants a Barton 2500+ installed on his Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra. His current XP install will not boot after one of his friends installed Boot Magic a second time in two months after being told NOT to:

SUMMARY of Diags run and things done:

First, Gigabyte has a BIOS out that DOES let this board run Barton 2500+ chips stably, though it does default to a slightly high voltage wheich I manually corrected in BIOS. It is the next to the most recent, and if you follow instructions verbatim q-flash will flash BIOS fine and CPU will run fine for many hours at a time (tested for 8 hours continuous run under load after fixing OTHER things). IIRC, it is version F18.

Try to load XP, from 2 different CDs(second was to test CD integrity and file copying only), identical problem, about halfway into the install it decides it has an inability to copy files. HD not bad, not too big, and passed mfr diags and successfully zero-packed on same computer and same cable. Try 4 more times, each time XP install breaks, once it compains of RAM problems, and HD is not being used in SMART mode.

Customer had given me one generic DDR333 512 MB stick, and had me get one Corsair stick. Turned out that alhough the rAM could count up it was one of three things: OC'd; and\or: overheating easily; or had been staticed. XP install once stopped with a Memory stop error, an error 7E (I am skipping all the lead zeroes, they are not significant except that number of zeros and sometimes the hex error code also will ID them as XP stop errors as opposed to 2000 stop errors).

So, if XP thinks it has file copy problems, you HAVE checked the HD and cable and the box sees the CPU, even though the RAM counts up at boot try changing out RAM modules. In this case, the RAM module was second in line, and the install routine DOES use large amounts of RAM as buffer for work and failed about half way through copying files with a consistent first bad copy of SHLDOCDL.DLL failing to copy and the rest multiple and variable copy and stop error failures from install run to install run.

John.

Comments

  • edited October 2003
    There's a program that runs in dos called quicktech pro that has a pretty intensive burn in memory test that can usually out bad memory or memory controllers (you'll know if it's either because bad memory will show errors at the same address all the time and a bad controller will have errors showing up in different places in different stages of the test) and it can also spot bad video memory.
    I had the funniest thing happening on my shuttle with a TI4800se, it would have dollar signs floating around the screen (looking oddly like something from the matrix) in bios and in the boot up up until XP's drivers took over after that it was OK.
    After swapping memory stick after memory stick and running quicktech for system memory I ran the video memory test and the card failed.
    Long story short, I swapped the TI4800se for a 9600pro and the matrix went away.
    I highly recommend Quicktech Pro to anyone doing any amount of pc repair in a retail environment.
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