Tech guy's assessment. What do you think?

[Pimpom]

This problem is not mine. I saw it in a forum and it made me curious enough
to want to get to the bottom of it. If anyone can offer an explanation or a
solution, I'll pass it on with credit to the source.

Pentium D on an Asus P5RD2-VM, 1GB DDR2, 320GB WD SATA.
Problem: BSOD while loading Windows.
Installed XP and 7 on another computer and then fitted the HDD to the
computer. Same BSOD after Welcome screen.
PC restarts too quickly to read error messages.
Tried Safe Mode, format, reinstall.
Tried 3 different HDDs.

I suggested memtest86, but the guy says the RAM works on another computer.
Told him to test anyway. Also suggested swapping the PSU.

It looks as if the mobo or the CPU is defective. But here's the crunch
(really my reason for posting here):
He took it to a local shop and the tech guy said that he can solve the
problem by installing Windows himself, but the owner can't ever format the
HDD or reinstall the OS. He also claimed that using a PATA drive for OS and
SATA for data will also work.

The owner is apparently reluctant to go along blindly. Opinions please?

 

[Paul]

This problem is not mine. I saw it in a forum and it made me curious enough
to want to get to the bottom of it. If anyone can offer an explanation or a
solution, I'll pass it on with credit to the source.

Pentium D on an Asus P5RD2-VM, 1GB DDR2, 320GB WD SATA.
Problem: BSOD while loading Windows.
Installed XP and 7 on another computer and then fitted the HDD to the
computer. Same BSOD after Welcome screen.
PC restarts too quickly to read error messages.
Tried Safe Mode, format, reinstall.
Tried 3 different HDDs.

I suggested memtest86, but the guy says the RAM works on another computer.
Told him to test anyway. Also suggested swapping the PSU.

It looks as if the mobo or the CPU is defective. But here's the crunch
(really my reason for posting here):
He took it to a local shop and the tech guy said that he can solve the
problem by installing Windows himself, but the owner can't ever format the
HDD or reinstall the OS. He also claimed that using a PATA drive for OS and
SATA for data will also work.

The owner is apparently reluctant to go along blindly. Opinions please?

I sure hope I'm not mis-reading what you've posted above.

I get the impression you've installed XP and Windows 7 on a hard
drive, while it was connected to *another* computer. And then moved
it over to a different motherboard (to the P5RD2-VM) and expected
that disk image to boot.

For that to work, the operating system must have a driver available
in the install, to operate the disk interface on the P5RD2-VM and
complete the reading from the disk.

At some point, the boot process switches from using Extended INT 0x13
disk reading mode, to using the operating system driver. Eventually,
the operating system is going to want to use its own driver.

If there isn't a driver, you may get an error like "inaccessible boot
volume" or the like.

Windows has an item in a control panel, which prevents "restart on error".
That makes a blue screen error stand still, so you can read it. For
example, in WinXP...

Control Panels:System:Advanced:Startup and Recovery:untick Automatically restart

You would need to move the disk, back to the machine you prepared it on.
Go into WinXP and change that setting to prevent immediate restart on error.
Then, move the disk back to the P5RD2 and see the inaccessible boot
volume message. (The following link, is just a reference to where
you could look up such an error message.)

http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm

"0x0000007B: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

Also, since you've installed two OSes, the installation order of the two
OSes determines which one is using its boot manager. Normally, you'd install
the newer OS last, as Windows 7 "knows" about WinXP, but WinXP doesn't know
what to do with Windows 7. So that means, if anything is going on here, it
is Windows 7 that starts to boot, at least until it gets to the boot manager,
and then you get to choose which OS to load from there.

*******

The "tech guy" is going to use the same approach he uses on any system.
That might include using memtest. Or perhaps using Seatools from Seagate,
to test a Seagate disk drive. Once a few component level tests are
completed, then try doing an install. At the appropriate time, press
F6 and offer a driver for the disk interface, *if* one is needed.
Some chipsets, for example, have a standard IDE interface, and no
driver is needed, as there is one in the OS already.

He might be successful, or he may conclude after it fails, there is
some other hardware problem with the machine.

I'm sure the "tech guy" would have been a little concerned about
the moving of a boot drive, from one computer to another, and
may have expressed some opinion about the odds of that working,
when the proper driver isn't in place to operate the disk
interface on the (transplanted) computer.

You *can* move drives, from one motherboard to another. There are
different recipes, depending on whether the new machine is similar
to the old machine or not. For example, to move my copy of WinXP
from an Asrock 4-Core family motherboard, to an Asus Intel chipset
based board, I used an add-in disk controller card. I installed
a driver for it on the sourcing system. And made sure the OS could
boot, using that add-in disk controller PCI card and the disk drive
I'd connected to it. I carried the hard drive and the disk controller
card, to the new motherboard and plugged it in. That way, I know the
driver needed, to read the disk, is available. The system came up, and
WinXP told me I had 72 hours to re-activate my copy of Windows. Because
I did not make major changes to the hardware configuration, the same
hard disk serial number and Volume ID were present, the thing activated
using the Internet. So I didn't need to phone Microsoft and do it
manually. Moving a disk can be done, but you have to think about
the disk interface driver issue a bit, if you expect it to work.

(Activation voting scheme, tracks how many hardware changes you've made.
A motherboard changes the NIC and MAC, so is a "major" change. Any other
changes, such as a different amount of RAM, only makes things worse.)

http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm

*******

To prove the computer works, on *your* computer, you could download
Ubuntu from ubuntu.com and then take that 700MB ISO9660 file and
burn a CD with it (a really old CD burner, only burns up to 650MB,
as I learned the first time I did this). Use Nero or Imgburn, to properly
parse the file and make a bootable CD out of it. Ubuntu can be booted
from the CD, without installing any software. Check that Ubuntu boots
on your computer first.

I have version 10.04 LTS here. When it starts, there is an "Install"
Window, with a "Try Ubuntu 10.04 LTS" button on it. When you click
that button, no software is installed, and the OS will run, using
only the CDROM image as a source of executable code. The memory
on the computer holds all temporary results. (I'm viewing the results
of this test right now, in Virtual PC 2007, while I'm typing this.)

Then go to your friend's house, and boot the Ubuntu CD on the P5RD2-VM.
Does it work ? Does it stay up and not crash ? You can use the file
explorer, to check the partitions on the hard drive, that have WinXP
and Windows 7 on them. That would prove the hard drive is readable.
When the Ubuntu desktop comes up, you should see two icons on the left.
One is "Examples", the other is "Install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS". You
want the Examples folder. Double click. That will open the file manager
window. On the left of the file manager, you may see something like
"16 GB Filesystem" or, if the Windows partitions have disk labels,
the name of the partition will be showing. If I click once on my
"16 GB Filesystem", that mounts the file system in Linux and shows
the folders.

If you want a further hardware test, while Ubuntu is running, you
can download the Linux version of Prime95 from mersenne.org/freesoft .
You can use the stress test in there, to test the dual core processor
and RAM are good. Note that the web site is down a fair bit, so don't
be surprised if you cannot get there right now :-(

When you're finished, use the icon in the upper right of the Ubuntu desktop.
A left click there, should show a menu with "Shut down" as an option.
Do an orderly shutdown of the OS, so the file systems you've been
examining with the file explorer, are closed out properly. That is
preferable to just turning off the power (which isn't good for
most OSes).

*******

When I look at the manual for the P5RD2-VM, it uses the ULI M1575 Southbridge.
ULI is out of business, as Nvidia bought them. If you don't see chipset
drivers on the support.asus.com.tw site, don't panic. The remains
(what Nvidia chooses to support), are still here. I don't know
if Nvidia prepared Windows 7 drivers for these obsolete ULI products
or not.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/uli_drivers.html

If you download a file like the Integrated220 file, there is a zip.
I can "burrow" inside that with 7-ZIP (use "open inside" function on the
"IntegratedDriver2.20.exe" file for example). In there, I can find a
series of folders with TXTSETUP.OEM files in them. Folders such as
M5281, M5287, M5288, M5289. You'd need to figure out, somehow,
which of those SATA types is housed inside a M1575 Southbridge.
(It is probably M5288 for M1575 SATA.) Then, copy the contents
of the folder, such that the TXTSETUP.OEM file in there, ends up
at the top level of the floppy. That then becomes your "F6" driver
floppy, for your WinXP install. The "tech guy" may have to do
something like that, to get it working.

It is possible Windows 7 has that driver in it - I don't have
Windows 7 here, so can't check that possibility for you. It would
really depend on whether Nvidia "did the right thing" or not,
for the ULI products they acquired. One of the reasons at the time,
I wouldn't have been caught dead with a mixed chipset motherboard
(ATI + ULI). Mixed chipset motherboards are "twice the work",
searching for drivers.

Paul

 

[Pimpom]

I sure hope I'm not mis-reading what you've posted above.

You did. Paul, although I don't post much, I often visit a.c.h. I appreciate
what you do on the NG, but this time, you missed the part where I said that
it's NOT I who's having the problem. Please read my introductory statement
again.

The one with the problem is physically far far from where I am. I was
intrigued by his post in a forum and that's the extent of my involvement.

I get the impression you've installed XP and Windows 7 on a hard
drive, while it was connected to *another* computer. And then moved
it over to a different motherboard (to the P5RD2-VM) and expected
that disk image to boot.

Not XP *and* 7 at the same time. The owner apparently meant he tried XP and
then Win 7, but failed with both. The computer recently started crashing and
restarting during boot-up. Formatting and reinstalling Windows didn't make
any difference. So, as one of many things he tried, he connected the HDD to
another computer and installed Windows.

For that to work, the operating system must have a driver available
in the install, to operate the disk interface on the P5RD2-VM and
complete the reading from the disk.

At some point, the boot process switches from using Extended INT 0x13
disk reading mode, to using the operating system driver. Eventually,
the operating system is going to want to use its own driver.

If there isn't a driver, you may get an error like "inaccessible boot
volume" or the like.

I've done what the owner was trying to do, i.e., use an OS installed in one
machine to boot another. I do it to make a quick diagnosis of other people's
machines. The only time it ever failed was with an old Pentium on an 810e
motherboard.

Windows has an item in a control panel, which prevents "restart on
error". That makes a blue screen error stand still, so you can read it.
For
example, in WinXP...

Control Panels:System:Advanced:Startup and Recovery:untick
Automatically restart
You would need to move the disk, back to the machine you prepared it
on. Go into WinXP and change that setting to prevent immediate restart on
error. Then, move the disk back to the P5RD2 and see the inaccessible boot
volume message. (The following link, is just a reference to where
you could look up such an error message.)

http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm

"0x0000007B: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

All this is irrelevant as I am not the one working on the machine.

Also, since you've installed two OSes, the installation order of the
two OSes determines which one is using its boot manager. Normally, you'd
install the newer OS last, as Windows 7 "knows" about WinXP, but WinXP
doesn't know what to do with Windows 7. So that means, if anything is
going on
here, it is Windows 7 that starts to boot, at least until it gets to the
boot
manager, and then you get to choose which OS to load from there.

No, there's no two OSes installed together. Perhaps I didn't make that clear
enough the first time. The owner tried one OS after another.

*******

The "tech guy" is going to use the same approach he uses on any
system. That might include using memtest. Or perhaps using Seatools from
Seagate, to test a Seagate disk drive. Once a few component level tests
are
completed, then try doing an install. At the appropriate time, press
F6 and offer a driver for the disk interface, *if* one is needed.
Some chipsets, for example, have a standard IDE interface, and no
driver is needed, as there is one in the OS already.

A HDD diagnostic tool is not likely to be of help. As I said at the
beginning, the HD works in another computer but not in its own machine, that
is, the OS cannot finish boot-up. The owner took the "install OS in another
machine" route only after it failed to complete boot-up on his own computer.
Three other HDDs show exactly the same symptoms. His account strongly
indicates that he tried formatting and installing the OS several times
before he tried on another machine.

He might be successful, or he may conclude after it fails, there is
some other hardware problem with the machine.

I'm sure the "tech guy" would have been a little concerned about
the moving of a boot drive, from one computer to another, and
may have expressed some opinion about the odds of that working,
when the proper driver isn't in place to operate the disk
interface on the (transplanted) computer.

You *can* move drives, from one motherboard to another. There are
different recipes, depending on whether the new machine is similar
to the old machine or not. For example, to move my copy of WinXP
from an Asrock 4-Core family motherboard, to an Asus Intel chipset
based board, I used an add-in disk controller card. I installed
a driver for it on the sourcing system. And made sure the OS could
boot, using that add-in disk controller PCI card and the disk drive
I'd connected to it. I carried the hard drive and the disk controller
card, to the new motherboard and plugged it in. That way, I know the
driver needed, to read the disk, is available. The system came up, and
WinXP told me I had 72 hours to re-activate my copy of Windows.
Because I did not make major changes to the hardware configuration, the
same
hard disk serial number and Volume ID were present, the thing
activated using the Internet. So I didn't need to phone Microsoft and do
it
manually. Moving a disk can be done, but you have to think about
the disk interface driver issue a bit, if you expect it to work.

(Activation voting scheme, tracks how many hardware changes you've
made. A motherboard changes the NIC and MAC, so is a "major" change. Any
other changes, such as a different amount of RAM, only makes things
worse.)

http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm

*******

To prove the computer works, on *your* computer, you could download
Ubuntu from ubuntu.com and then take that 700MB ISO9660 file and
burn a CD with it (a really old CD burner, only burns up to 650MB,
as I learned the first time I did this). Use Nero or Imgburn, to
properly parse the file and make a bootable CD out of it. Ubuntu can be
booted
from the CD, without installing any software. Check that Ubuntu boots
on your computer first.

I appreciate your effort, but it's *not* my computer. The rest of what you
write below is pretty much irrelevant.

I have version 10.04 LTS here. When it starts, there is an "Install"
Window, with a "Try Ubuntu 10.04 LTS" button on it. When you click
that button, no software is installed, and the OS will run, using
only the CDROM image as a source of executable code. The memory
on the computer holds all temporary results. (I'm viewing the results
of this test right now, in Virtual PC 2007, while I'm typing this.)

Then go to your friend's house, and boot the Ubuntu CD on the
P5RD2-VM. Does it work ? Does it stay up and not crash ? You can use the
file
explorer, to check the partitions on the hard drive, that have WinXP
and Windows 7 on them. That would prove the hard drive is readable.
When the Ubuntu desktop comes up, you should see two icons on the
left. One is "Examples", the other is "Install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS". You
want the Examples folder. Double click. That will open the file
manager window. On the left of the file manager, you may see something
like
"16 GB Filesystem" or, if the Windows partitions have disk labels,
the name of the partition will be showing. If I click once on my
"16 GB Filesystem", that mounts the file system in Linux and shows
the folders.

If you want a further hardware test, while Ubuntu is running, you
can download the Linux version of Prime95 from mersenne.org/freesoft .
You can use the stress test in there, to test the dual core processor
and RAM are good. Note that the web site is down a fair bit, so don't
be surprised if you cannot get there right now :-(

When you're finished, use the icon in the upper right of the Ubuntu
desktop. A left click there, should show a menu with "Shut down" as an
option.
Do an orderly shutdown of the OS, so the file systems you've been
examining with the file explorer, are closed out properly. That is
preferable to just turning off the power (which isn't good for
most OSes).

*******

When I look at the manual for the P5RD2-VM, it uses the ULI M1575
Southbridge. ULI is out of business, as Nvidia bought them. If you don't
see
chipset drivers on the support.asus.com.tw site, don't panic. The remains
(what Nvidia chooses to support), are still here. I don't know
if Nvidia prepared Windows 7 drivers for these obsolete ULI products
or not.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/uli_drivers.html

If you download a file like the Integrated220 file, there is a zip.
I can "burrow" inside that with 7-ZIP (use "open inside" function on
the "IntegratedDriver2.20.exe" file for example). In there, I can
find a series of folders with TXTSETUP.OEM files in them. Folders such as
M5281, M5287, M5288, M5289. You'd need to figure out, somehow,
which of those SATA types is housed inside a M1575 Southbridge.
(It is probably M5288 for M1575 SATA.) Then, copy the contents
of the folder, such that the TXTSETUP.OEM file in there, ends up
at the top level of the floppy. That then becomes your "F6" driver
floppy, for your WinXP install. The "tech guy" may have to do
something like that, to get it working.

It is possible Windows 7 has that driver in it - I don't have
Windows 7 here, so can't check that possibility for you. It would
really depend on whether Nvidia "did the right thing" or not,
for the ULI products they acquired. One of the reasons at the time,
I wouldn't have been caught dead with a mixed chipset motherboard
(ATI + ULI). Mixed chipset motherboards are "twice the work",
searching for drivers.

Paul

To recap: It's not a driver issue. The computer was working before. It
started getting BSODs recently. Reinstallation of the OS made no difference.
My main reason for posting here is that I was intrigued by what the tech guy
said.

 

[Paul]

To recap: It's not a driver issue. The computer was working before. It
started getting BSODs recently. Reinstallation of the OS made no difference.
My main reason for posting here is that I was intrigued by what the tech guy
said.

When your friend installed the OS, with the hard drive connected to that machine,
does the computer run the installation to completion ? It seems strange
it would remain stable for the 20-30 minutes it takes to do that, and
yet crashes in seconds after the install is complete.

The "tech guy" theory could be "inaccessible boot volume" (install needs
a disk driver), and he may be suspecting that the computer owner isn't
installing the F6 driver at the beginning.

But he may be missing, there is still a hardware component to the
problem. When I had BSODs early in boot, they were a symptom of a
bad power supply. Once the power supply had "warmed up", it
would run forever, but I know that any symptom like that, was
eventually going to lead to a failure. And rather than wait
for the inevitable, I changed out the supply.

This is what I found inside - orange deposits on the caps. My
supply was an Antec built by ChannelWell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PSU_Caps.jpg

I'd want to try the Ubuntu CD test, as it gives a
"second opinion" on the hardware. You can't really test
for a power supply problem, unless you already have
smoke, a smell, or other evidence. While you can use
a multimeter to check rail voltages, that doesn't
cover noise transients, which could be enough to BSOD
the machine. A multimeter is not a complete test.
Swapping the supply, is the cheapest way for home
users to determine it is the cause of their problems.

The "tech guy" would likely switch back to hardware
testing, if his attempts to install end up doing the
same thing.

Some brands of existing power supplies, are positively dangerous,
and are known to damage hardware when they blow completely.
There is a certain Bestec 250W model 12E that does that. A lot of
other supplies, will blow without ruining other stuff. My Antec
might have been OK when it eventually went. But I don't like
to test that kind of theory, any more than I need to.

Paul

 

[Pimpom]

When your friend

He's not my friend. He's someone with fewer than 40 posts so far in a forum
I sometimes visit. I never noticed him until he started this thread asking
for help.

installed the OS, with the hard drive connected to
that machine, does the computer run the installation to completion ?
It seems strange it would remain stable for the 20-30 minutes it takes to
do that, and
yet crashes in seconds after the install is complete.

I'm not sure if he could complete the OS installation. I'll ask. But he
obviously managed to get the installation at least up to the point where the
Windows welcome screen comes up at boot-up.

The "tech guy" theory could be "inaccessible boot volume" (install
needs a disk driver), and he may be suspecting that the computer owner
isn't
installing the F6 driver at the beginning.

But he may be missing, there is still a hardware component to the
problem. When I had BSODs early in boot, they were a symptom of a
bad power supply. Once the power supply had "warmed up", it
would run forever, but I know that any symptom like that, was
eventually going to lead to a failure. And rather than wait
for the inevitable, I changed out the supply.

It seems he's already swapped PSUs with two other working computers.

............<snip>..............