Windows keep rebooting after hardware upgrade

[Guest]

In the quest of trying to quiet down my old PC, I accidentally burnt my CPU
when putting on a heatsink incorrectly. Since it's fairly old, I decided to
move on and get a new CPU, which requires a new motherboard and RAM. So
basically I got a bunch of new hardware upgrade at the same time.

The first time after the upgrade, I got to the XP Pro login screen and it
said that I need to activate the copy of the Windows to use it. I recall the
activation checks for hardware component so I decided to not activate it at
that time as I was still planning to add other hardware upgrade. I shut the
system down and went on to get the other hardware components. While doing
this, I got a great deal on CPU/MB combo so I exchanged what I purchased last
week with this new CPU/MB combo.

After I putting in the new CPU/MB combo last night, Windows would just boot
into a text screen telling me that the last boot was unsuccessful and asked
me to choose between safe mode, safe mode with network, last known good
configuration, etc. However, whatever I choose, it booted into a blue screen
and rebooted itself. The blue screen lasted a fraction of a second and I
couldn't read anything off of it. The system just cycle through this: asking
me to choose what mode to boot, got into a blue screen that I couldn't read,
and reboot.

1. How do I troubleshoot this?
2. Is there anyway to make the blue screen stay so I can do better
troubleshooting? The pause key doesn't work as it passes so fast and I could
never caught it at the right time.
3. Is it because of the hardware or CPU upgrade? I went through an old
Athlon 1 Ghz to an Athlon 64 2800+. Could the new 64 bit CPU be part of this?
4. I have the original installation CD of my Win XP Pro? Can I use that to
repair my system?
5. If re-install over the existing copy, will my application still work?
6. Do I need to re-activate my Win XP and Office XP? Will this hadware
upgrade cause my system to be considered a new one and therefore, activation
would fail?

Thanks for any help.

Leo

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Changing a Motherboard or Moving a Hard Drive with XP Installed
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

[Courtesy of MS-MVP Michael Stevens]

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| In the quest of trying to quiet down my old PC, I accidentally burnt my CPU
| when putting on a heatsink incorrectly. Since it's fairly old, I decided to
| move on and get a new CPU, which requires a new motherboard and RAM. So
| basically I got a bunch of new hardware upgrade at the same time.
|
| The first time after the upgrade, I got to the XP Pro login screen and it
| said that I need to activate the copy of the Windows to use it. I recall the
| activation checks for hardware component so I decided to not activate it at
| that time as I was still planning to add other hardware upgrade. I shut the
| system down and went on to get the other hardware components. While doing
| this, I got a great deal on CPU/MB combo so I exchanged what I purchased last
| week with this new CPU/MB combo.
|
| After I putting in the new CPU/MB combo last night, Windows would just boot
| into a text screen telling me that the last boot was unsuccessful and asked
| me to choose between safe mode, safe mode with network, last known good
| configuration, etc. However, whatever I choose, it booted into a blue screen
| and rebooted itself. The blue screen lasted a fraction of a second and I
| couldn't read anything off of it. The system just cycle through this: asking
| me to choose what mode to boot, got into a blue screen that I couldn't read,
| and reboot.
|
| 1. How do I troubleshoot this?
| 2. Is there anyway to make the blue screen stay so I can do better
| troubleshooting? The pause key doesn't work as it passes so fast and I could
| never caught it at the right time.
| 3. Is it because of the hardware or CPU upgrade? I went through an old
| Athlon 1 Ghz to an Athlon 64 2800+. Could the new 64 bit CPU be part of this?
| 4. I have the original installation CD of my Win XP Pro? Can I use that to
| repair my system?
| 5. If re-install over the existing copy, will my application still work?
| 6. Do I need to re-activate my Win XP and Office XP? Will this hadware
| upgrade cause my system to be considered a new one and therefore, activation
| would fail?
|
| Thanks for any help.
|
| Leo

 

[Guest]

I had a similar problem as far as the BSOD message going by and was helped by
Americantechie.I hope ithelps. Good luck.
If the BSOD message goes by too fast.......and you are in a boot loop,
If this is the case you can go into safemode and do the
following...

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
3. Clear the Automatically restart check box under System failure, and then
click OK. The error message should remain on the screen so that you can
record the error information.

This will at least stop you on the error message and give you a chance to
read it.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

This may not work since XP is now detecting a different motherboard than the
one it was install on before. The "other' respond is only ways to fix the
problem, because of XP Product Activation.

 

[kurttrail]

I had a similar problem as far as the BSOD message going by and was
helped by Americantechie.I hope ithelps. Good luck.
If the BSOD message goes by too fast.......and you are in a boot loop,
If this is the case you can go into safemode and do the
following...

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
3. Clear the Automatically restart check box under System failure,
and then click OK. The error message should remain on the screen so
that you can record the error information.

This will at least stop you on the error message and give you a
chance to read it.

Since you don't know what you are talking about, maybe you educate
yourself before answering questions here.

The OP can't get into Windows to do what you advised, so if you got a
question, ask it, but don't go answering people questions, you are
computer literate enough yet.

--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
microscum.pubic.windowsexp.gonorrhea
http://microscum.com/mscommunity
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
"Produkt-Aktivierung macht frei"

 

[Guest]

Thanks to every one who responded to my request for help. I really
appreciated it.

It seems that my problem was caused by the product activation as it went
away after I tried a "repair install" with the original CD. I never had a
chance to read what's on that BSOD as it never showed up again after the
repair install.

Now I am having a different problem of Windows booting much much slower. One
of the things I really liked about XP when I switched was its fast boot time.
It used to take ~20 seconds to get to the logon screen and 5 to 10 seconds to
complete the logon from there. I was able to lauch applications like IE in
less than a minute from the time I turned the PC on. And all these were on a
five-year-old Athlon 1 Ghz (yeah, it's so old that's before they even came
out with the 2000+ kind of rating) and slow RAM.

I now have an Athlon 64 2800+ with new PC3200 DDR2 RAM (same 512 MB). It
takes about two and half minutes to get to the logon screen. After I logon, I
could move the mouse around but it took a good 1 minute and half before I can
launch any application. This is really bizzar. Once logon completes, it seems
pretty fast. I just wonder what is going on.

I suspected it might be fragmentation of the system files because the
original install was on a fresh file system and the system files are probably
laid out nicely. I noticed the repair install deleted a whole bunch of files
and re-copied them. The HD was 80% full so I removed/uninstalled things to
make it 60% and defragged the drive. It still takes approximately the same
amount of time (~4 minutes vs. less then 1 before this saga).

I saw some threads in this forum about possible driver conflicts and/or
doing a clean reboot troubleshoot. I will try some of those and see if I can
get things close to where it was. If anybody has some suggestions, I would be
glad to hear about them too.

Thanks a lot.

Yen

 

[Charles C. Drew]

|
| Now I am having a different problem of Windows booting much much slower.
One
| of the things I really liked about XP when I switched was its fast boot
time.
| It used to take ~20 seconds to get to the logon screen and 5 to 10 seconds
to
| complete the logon from there. I was able to lauch applications like IE in
| less than a minute from the time I turned the PC on. And all these were on
a
| five-year-old Athlon 1 Ghz (yeah, it's so old that's before they even came
| out with the 2000+ kind of rating) and slow RAM.
|
| I now have an Athlon 64 2800+ with new PC3200 DDR2 RAM (same 512 MB). It
| takes about two and half minutes to get to the logon screen. After I
logon, I
| could move the mouse around but it took a good 1 minute and half before I
can
| launch any application. This is really bizzar. Once logon completes, it
seems
| pretty fast. I just wonder what is going on.
|
| Thanks a lot.
|
| Yen
|
| "Yves Leclerc" wrote:
|


One issue that WILL cause this kind of slowdown is network mapped drives to
network shares that can no longer be reached. What happens in this case is
XP keeps trying to connect to the unreachable drive share. Each time you
open Explorer, "file open" options, etc., XP will try searching for the
drive share again. This will even affect boot times and shutdowns.

If you have any drive shares that you don't use, simply right click on them
from the Windows Explorer and select "disconnect" or "delete". Your
performance should return.

 

[Guest]

I don't have network drive on this sstem so it's probably not the cause of
the slow down. To make matter worse, I have run into another very strange
problem in this whole thing.

I was going to try the clean boot troubleshoot but in the process, I
remembered that I have installed sp2 on this box a long while back. The
repair install I did was using a CD that has sp1. I thought maybe there are
driver mismatches between the versions of sp and decided that I would apply
all the windows update and later sp2. I had already tried rebooting with a
few things disabled in the drivers before I applying sp2 (via msconfig) and
that worked even though it still took more than 4 minutes before I can launch
any program from turning computer on (vs. less than 1 minute before). After
applying sp2, I also had a successful boot and it still didn't speed up the
boot process.

I decided to do a diagnostic boot and the strangest thing happened. It
booted up, still fairly slow, and asked me to activate the software before I
can log in. I did not change the hardware in the system (physically) but I
did try to "uninstall" some stale hardware entries in the device manager. Why
am I being asked to activate again? This is getting rather painful...