strange happenings ... XP hangs

[scorman]

I'll try to keep too many details to a minimum.

Was having problems when I switched an AMD850MHz board to a new case
with two old hard drives. Original settup on that board had 256MB +
128MB PC100 memory. Added one 64MB from older board. Post shows 448MB
and AMD 850 CPU. Would not boot at first, tried XP Pro repair ..went
thru many iterations and when finally booted up ..Netscape would work,
but IE crashed as soon as I entered anything on location bar or
bookmark...screen freezes.

Finally decided to start from scratch, reformatted the 9GB HD, loaded
new XP Pro.

Hung at very end at "welcome to Windows" screen. Rebooted a few times,
sometimes screen went half blank and hung. There are no other programs
loaded to the new install. Finally came up, opened IE ..home screen
opened, typed yahoo.com on location bar and at "enter", screen froze.

I am thinking a hardware problem, but I must be thick, because I can't
think of any bios setting that could cause this behavior. I swapped the
three memory chips in the three slots ... didn't help..is it possible
that one of the memory cards is incompatible?

TIA
Stew Corman

 

[Ed Medlin]

Did you reinstall your video card and MB chipset drivers?

Ed

 

[scorman]

an update to the debacle:

the situation got worse
after several iterations of trying to rest bios settings, all of a
sudden the AGP card was only recognized as a generic PCI video card and
res went down to 640x480 and at same time, the ethernet card was not
recognized ...replugged both cards

I am loading Win Xp from the CD and all the components are easily
loaded from their database

went to jumpers on board and did a "clear CMOS" and had to reenter time
and date, etc

I just found an older 2GB Maxtor HD and replaced the previous one
....the version of WIN 95 that was on it booted up, so I reformatted and
tried to load WIN XP and it fails 80% thru by showing a blue screen "
had to shut down system to prevent damage" ..this happened three times
...never finished the load ...


first error screen showed "IRQL-NOT-LESS-OR-EQUAL" and recommended
disabling cache and shadowing ...I could only find "external cache" and
"video shadowing" in bios and disabled both ...did not solve anything

I am tempted to cut a bootable CD with "memtest86" to check memory

I cannot figure out what is screwed up here.
Any hints on bios settings will be appreciated.

Stew Corman

 

[Larry Weak]

an update to the debacle:

the situation got worse
after several iterations of trying to rest bios settings, all of a
sudden the AGP card was only recognized as a generic PCI video card and
res went down to 640x480 and at same time, the ethernet card was not
recognized ...replugged both cards

I am loading Win Xp from the CD and all the components are easily
loaded from their database

went to jumpers on board and did a "clear CMOS" and had to reenter time
and date, etc

I just found an older 2GB Maxtor HD and replaced the previous one
...the version of WIN 95 that was on it booted up, so I reformatted and
tried to load WIN XP and it fails 80% thru by showing a blue screen "
had to shut down system to prevent damage" ..this happened three times
..never finished the load ...

Last time i had problems like this was a failing cd rom drive AND a
questionable HD. CDRom failed during install. Hd failed withing 24 hrs.

Larry