win2k nightmare (system freezes)

[ron]

hi,
one of our win2k machines (an ibm netvista)started
freezing up. when i could get it up long enough to run
the antivirus software it couldn't find anything (we have
norton corporate edition for the site and i also tried
trendmicro's and mcafee's free online scans). even in
safe mode, nothing was found. for some weird reason, if i
get one of norton's virus removal tools started (like the
sasser tool) the system won't lock up while it is running,
but as soon as it is done, it will lock up. out of
frustration i wiped the drive (i didn't know win2k would
be so picky) then put it into my system (another ibm
netvista) as a slave and copied the drive. when i
returned the drive to its original case, i started it up
and the *($&%% thing locked up again. if it is a virus
how could it survive a partition delete and format? if it
is a hardware problem, what would most likely be the
problem? the only expansion cards are a network card and
video card (i have since removed the video card). i have
tried repairing it with the cd and the emergency repair
disk. do i have to do a reinstall on over the current
setup? will that preserve the links to the software that
is on there such as office and word? any help would be
greatly appreciated.

..

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

hi,
one of our win2k machines (an ibm netvista)started
freezing up. when i could get it up long enough to run
the antivirus software it couldn't find anything (we have
norton corporate edition for the site and i also tried
trendmicro's and mcafee's free online scans). even in
safe mode, nothing was found. for some weird reason, if i
get one of norton's virus removal tools started (like the
sasser tool) the system won't lock up while it is running,
but as soon as it is done, it will lock up. out of
frustration i wiped the drive (i didn't know win2k would
be so picky) then put it into my system (another ibm
netvista) as a slave and copied the drive. when i
returned the drive to its original case, i started it up
and the *($&%% thing locked up again. if it is a virus
how could it survive a partition delete and format? if it
is a hardware problem, what would most likely be the
problem? the only expansion cards are a network card and
video card (i have since removed the video card). i have
tried repairing it with the cd and the emergency repair
disk. do i have to do a reinstall on over the current
setup? will that preserve the links to the software that
is on there such as office and word? any help would be
greatly appreciated.

.

- How exactly did you wipe the drive?
- When the disk was a slave in your own PC, how exactly
did you copy things across?

 

[ron]

actually, i did it a couple of times. the first time i
removed the drive, took it home and put it in an extra
case that i had, then think i used a win98 boot disk and
ran fdisk to delete all of the partitions (this drive had
that ibm_preload and one other partition that i can't
remember what they called it) then created one partition
utilizing the whole drive then i formatted. after the
format i booted with the win2k pro cd. it ran ok at
home. nothing seemed to be wrong. i even installed the
norton to ensure that it had antivirus coverage. when i
got it back to work and put it back into the original case
it still would freeze. at the time i didn't know that
win2k drives had trouble being moved from system to
system. after that i took the drive out again and put it
into my win2k machine and ran partition manager. that
enabled me to copy my drive to it (my drive also had that
ibm_preload stuff). when it was done i disconnected my
drive and rebooted with the clone. it worked fine in my
machine but as soon as i put it back into it original
system it continued to freeze at various points. i've
tried to do the repair thing with the cd to give the drive
a chance to see all of the hardware components in the
original system but that doesn't seem to help. at least i
have the product code if i have to do a reinstall. does
this help?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

You basically ported a Win2000 installation from one PC
to another. Here is Microsoft's suggestion of how to go
about this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824125

 

[Alan Illeman]

actually, i did it a couple of times. the first time i
removed the drive, took it home and put it in an extra
case that i had, then think i used a win98 boot disk and
ran fdisk to delete all of the partitions

I also run "fdisk /mbr" to remove the 'Master Boot Record',
just to be sure, before (re-)installing.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I also run "fdisk /mbr" to remove the 'Master Boot Record',
just to be sure, before (re-)installing.

fdisk /mbr won't remove the Master Boot Record; it will restore it.

 

[Alan Illeman]

fdisk /mbr won't remove the Master Boot Record; it will restore it.

Couldn't find any docs on the /mbr switch, but you're probably
right. I thought I had inadvertently clobbered one of my older
systems with this switch - and now I find that indeed the MBR
is okay, and have restored the system easily. So thanks!

Alan

 

[ron]

ok, i finally had a chance to follow the instructions on
the support page. i did it as if i were replacing the
motherboard. i put the cloned drive back into my system,
started it up and fixed any cliches, from windows ran
setup from the cd, shut off the system as it restarted,
removed the cloned drive, put it into its proper system
and started up, continued with setup, setup finished and
the system restarted. it got the the blue screen but
before it did loaded the settings and security policy it
restarted again. this time it got to the black 'starting
windows' screen, took a few minutes then restarted again.
it did that one more time then the screen went black with
no ativity. i turned it off then tried restarting in safe
mode and it got stuck at the black 'starting windows'
screen. i turned it off then tried restarting in safe
mode with command prompt and it got stayed at the
black 'starting windows' screen for a few minutes then
went on the blue screen saying wait for something (forgot
what it said). a couple minutes later it rebooted again.
i went for safe mode with command prompt again and now it
is stuck at the black 'starting windows' screen. why is
it restarting so much?

 

[ron]

i turned off the system, restarted with the cd to do a
repair. the thing got all the way to the 'performing
final tasks' screen at 'registers components' and the
scrool bar got about 75% of the way across then it froze
again.

 

[pen]

At this point, you have to consider it's a hardware problem.
As a first step, download and run from a bootable floppy
memtest86.
http://www.memtest86.com/