S
salvatore
I have a Dell Dimension 4300 received for Christmas, a hand-me-down from
family. It's a PIV 1.4 with 256mb 133 RAM, stock Dell video, HDD, et
cetera.
Last night I attempted to install a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional,
and had to abort it after several hours went by without any progress. The
install process began as normal, and seemed normal until it came to the step
of copying files from the CD to the machine, which took an hour all by
itself (normally it takes fifteen minutes tops). The machine rebooted and
the graphical portion of setup continued, but never progressed past '39
minutes remaining'. The splash screen kept changing, and the little green
squares in the bottom right of the screen were still animated, so I know it
wasnt frozen. I left it this way for several hours, but it never moved from
'39 minutes remaining'.
I changed hard drives to a Maxtor I had lying around, same results. I tried
installing Windows 2000 Professional, same results. I've ran Memtest on it
to make sure the RAM was good, which it was. I even swaped the IDE cables
(primary and secondary), same results. I also flashed the BIOS from A02 to
A06.
Also, on boot there is a single line of ASCII characters on the Dell splash
screen, but there doesnt seem to be any ill-effects from that...possible
that its a symptom of the above issue?
Since this is reproducable with multiple install mediums and on multiple
hard drives, it makes sense to believe this is a hardware issue. Anyone
have any suggestions? I have no problem altering the BIOS, or cracking the
machine open if this is a simple fix.
..salvatore
http://www.sienar.org/
http://www.palmisanonet.com/
family. It's a PIV 1.4 with 256mb 133 RAM, stock Dell video, HDD, et
cetera.
Last night I attempted to install a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional,
and had to abort it after several hours went by without any progress. The
install process began as normal, and seemed normal until it came to the step
of copying files from the CD to the machine, which took an hour all by
itself (normally it takes fifteen minutes tops). The machine rebooted and
the graphical portion of setup continued, but never progressed past '39
minutes remaining'. The splash screen kept changing, and the little green
squares in the bottom right of the screen were still animated, so I know it
wasnt frozen. I left it this way for several hours, but it never moved from
'39 minutes remaining'.
I changed hard drives to a Maxtor I had lying around, same results. I tried
installing Windows 2000 Professional, same results. I've ran Memtest on it
to make sure the RAM was good, which it was. I even swaped the IDE cables
(primary and secondary), same results. I also flashed the BIOS from A02 to
A06.
Also, on boot there is a single line of ASCII characters on the Dell splash
screen, but there doesnt seem to be any ill-effects from that...possible
that its a symptom of the above issue?
Since this is reproducable with multiple install mediums and on multiple
hard drives, it makes sense to believe this is a hardware issue. Anyone
have any suggestions? I have no problem altering the BIOS, or cracking the
machine open if this is a simple fix.
..salvatore
http://www.sienar.org/
http://www.palmisanonet.com/