C
Corey Cooper
For my office, I upgraded the motherboards for four computers using the info
from the MSDN article "HOW TO: Replace the Motherboard on a Computer That Is
Running Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003". In all cases I was upgrading
from an Abit PII motherboard to an Intel PERL P4 system. I had no problems.
So when I decided to spend the money for my own machine with the same
set-up, I thought I would have no problems. The only difference between the
others I did and my home system is my home system has a Matrox G550 AGP card
setup with dual monitors (I disabled the second one for the MB swap) and my
home machine has LOTS more software. I tried to disable as much of the
auto-loaded on boot up stuff as I could (Norton Anti-Virus and the like).
What happened first:
I cloned my primary partition to another (smaller) drive I had laying around
just as a backup. I started the first part of the board swap (start Win2K
install, and stop it when it gets to the first re-boot.) I then swapped the
MB and continued. The install progress bar gets about ½ way through and
suddenly just re-boots, and if I let it, the process starts over and reboots
at the same point. I spent all weekend doing this over and over with every
variation I can figure out like disabling as much of the on-board
peripherals as possible, first un-installing the network card from the
original set-up etc.
Question one: is there any way to generate a log file of what is being
done, to figure out what is failing? Or if one is already being generated,
where is it?
At one point, I couldn't get the machine to boot at all, so I re-installed
from the backup and luckily everything worked fine. However, that threw the
fear of whatever into me, and I bought a new (larger) drive, cloned it
completely from my original, and went through the whole process again, using
my cloned drive.
Now, the install program won't start because it tells me that a program "has
not finished installing", and I need to re-boot and let it finish. No
matter how many times I re-boot, it still says the same thing. I can't find
out what it thinks hasn't finished! I checked the registry
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Runonce but that
has nothing in it, and I can't think of anything else to look for to get
past this screen.
Question two: Is there something about putting a new drive in that could
cause the "something has not finished installing", and if so, how do I make
it complete the process?
Since I couldn't get the first part of the MB swap sequence to work, I tried
the "if the motherboard has failed" protocol from the same KB article. It
gets to the progress bar about ½ way done and suddenly re-boots, just like
above.
Corey Cooper
from the MSDN article "HOW TO: Replace the Motherboard on a Computer That Is
Running Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003". In all cases I was upgrading
from an Abit PII motherboard to an Intel PERL P4 system. I had no problems.
So when I decided to spend the money for my own machine with the same
set-up, I thought I would have no problems. The only difference between the
others I did and my home system is my home system has a Matrox G550 AGP card
setup with dual monitors (I disabled the second one for the MB swap) and my
home machine has LOTS more software. I tried to disable as much of the
auto-loaded on boot up stuff as I could (Norton Anti-Virus and the like).
What happened first:
I cloned my primary partition to another (smaller) drive I had laying around
just as a backup. I started the first part of the board swap (start Win2K
install, and stop it when it gets to the first re-boot.) I then swapped the
MB and continued. The install progress bar gets about ½ way through and
suddenly just re-boots, and if I let it, the process starts over and reboots
at the same point. I spent all weekend doing this over and over with every
variation I can figure out like disabling as much of the on-board
peripherals as possible, first un-installing the network card from the
original set-up etc.
Question one: is there any way to generate a log file of what is being
done, to figure out what is failing? Or if one is already being generated,
where is it?
At one point, I couldn't get the machine to boot at all, so I re-installed
from the backup and luckily everything worked fine. However, that threw the
fear of whatever into me, and I bought a new (larger) drive, cloned it
completely from my original, and went through the whole process again, using
my cloned drive.
Now, the install program won't start because it tells me that a program "has
not finished installing", and I need to re-boot and let it finish. No
matter how many times I re-boot, it still says the same thing. I can't find
out what it thinks hasn't finished! I checked the registry
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Runonce but that
has nothing in it, and I can't think of anything else to look for to get
past this screen.
Question two: Is there something about putting a new drive in that could
cause the "something has not finished installing", and if so, how do I make
it complete the process?
Since I couldn't get the first part of the MB swap sequence to work, I tried
the "if the motherboard has failed" protocol from the same KB article. It
gets to the progress bar about ½ way done and suddenly re-boots, just like
above.
Corey Cooper