Freeze on "Setup is inspecting your computers configuration"

[Marc Davis]

I am trying to install Win 2Kon a Gateway 2000 with a 200
mhz pentium with MMX 96 meg of ram and a 6 gig hard drive.
I put the win 2k setup disk in and restart the computer.
it freezes at the beginning "Setup is inspecting your
computers configuration"
It does not matter how long I leave it.
I have the latest manufacturer bios
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
Marc
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Dave Patrick]

The latest mfgr bios may not be enough. Check the HCL at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/howtobuy/upgrading/compat/default.asp

Also try removing all non-essential hardware, get through the install, then
add the hardware back in one at a time.

I have an old gateway 200 pent-pro that I wouldn't even attempt Windows 2000
on. It still rocks with Windows NT server though.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft MVP [Windows NT/2000 Operating Systems]

 

[Dan Seur]

I have W2k SP2 running on a 1997 homebuilt AMD K5 100MHz 64MB RAM,
Award Bios, so your problem puzzles me. I did a clean install; are you
trying an upgrade?

I also ran, from the W2k CD:
CD:\i386\winnt32.exe /checkupgradeonly
before formatting/installing (the machine was NT4SP6a), which analyzes
for & reports hardware (and some software) components that may give W2k
problems, and suggests steps to take when possible.

With the /checkupgradeonly parameter, winnt32.exe will not start an
install - it will only do this analysis & create a useful report. It
must be run from a 32-bit Windows OS; winnt.exe doesn't have this parameter.

While I certainly wouldn't use this machine for normal activity, it
serves very well as a file backup/archive across the LAN.

Your machine will doubtless be faster at 200MHz and 96MB RAM, but be
warned that W2k ought to have a 4-6GB boot/system partition to
accommodate itself for any length of time in a system with more than a
very few basic applications. With only a 6GB hard drive you're probably
forced to put all your applications and data in the boot/system
partition, which leave you very vulnerable to a loss of everything in
the event of an unrecoverable system failure of almost any kind. Thin ice.

 

[Guest]

I forgot to mention. I am on the first of the 4 floppy
disks that start the system up before it gets to the cd.
We haven't even gotten to deciding anything yet.
It had 98 on it. I think it asks you during install if you
want to format the drive, delete a partition create a
partition. Ect....

 

[Dan Seur]

My stars! It can't get thru the 1st of the 4 diskettes?

Will the machine boot from a DOS floppy? Any flavor you have around
(plain MS DOS, DR DOS applications like PartitionMagic & Disk Image, or
anything else - even a downloadable floppy image from www.bootdisk.com?

I forget exactly what that 1st W2k diskette does, but maybe it's worth
making sure the floppy drive itself is healthy...

 

[marc]

It does boot to floppy. I did a bios upgrade, however the
disk could not be a win2k, or Nt formated disk. It had to
be formated in win 98 before it would work. The Bios
upgrade instructions even stated this.
Could this be a floppy that doesn't speak NTFS or
something like that? But then it starts to load the win2k
setup disk then loops indefinatly while checking my system.
Boy, I always get the weird ones.
Thanks
Marc

 

[Dan Seur]

If you have instructions (presumably from Gateway) saying the hardware
can't handle floppies unless they're formatted under W98, then that's
your problem I guess. Something odd about the drive or controller.

One workaround would be to take the W2k CD to a W98 machine and create
the 4 floppies there; then see if they work.

I'm not familiar enough with the subtle differences between NT-based and
DOS-based floppy formatting, both of which are normally FAT16, to make
any but the most speculative suggestions other than the above.

I might mention that one fairly common cause of a machine's inability to
use floppies formatted and/or written on another machine is a slight
head alignment displacement on one or the other. Heads do drift
sometimes over the long haul, and that creates a situation where one
machine puts the tracks here and the other tries to read them over there
(where they're not.) It doesn't take much drift at all, and it's very
frustrating. Finding whether that's the problem (and on which machine)
is usually a matter of creating and then carrying diskettes among 3 or
more machines to see which machine is out of alignment.