Windows XP CD will not recognize existing installation

[Daniel Prince]

My brother has a home built PC. It has an AMD Athlon (tm) 64 3700+
CPU with HyperTransport (tm). The motherboard is a Gigabyte
GA-K8NSC-939. He has two, one-gig Crucial DDR ram modules. He does
not know if his memory is ecc or not. He does not remember how old
his system is but he says that the motherboard was obsolete when he
bought it.

Recently he has been having problems with his computer locking up.
It started with ACDSee 9 but progressed to other programs.

He wants to do a repair installation of Windows XP. He has Windows
XP Home with SP3. His Windows XP CD is the upgrade version with
SP2. When he boots with his Windows XP CD, it does not recognize
his existing installation. It says that he needs to insert the CD
from a previous version.

He does not want to do a clean install because he would lose all his
settings.

Does anyone know why his Windows XP CD will not recognize existing
installation? Is his motherboard known to have the bad electrolytic
capacitors that fail prematurely? Is there a Windows newsgroup
where I should ask this question?

Thank you in advance for all replies.

 

[Pen]

My brother has a home built PC. It has an AMD Athlon (tm) 64 3700+
CPU with HyperTransport (tm). The motherboard is a Gigabyte
GA-K8NSC-939. He has two, one-gig Crucial DDR ram modules. He does
not know if his memory is ecc or not. He does not remember how old
his system is but he says that the motherboard was obsolete when he
bought it.

Recently he has been having problems with his computer locking up.
It started with ACDSee 9 but progressed to other programs.

He wants to do a repair installation of Windows XP. He has Windows
XP Home with SP3. His Windows XP CD is the upgrade version with
SP2. When he boots with his Windows XP CD, it does not recognize
his existing installation. It says that he needs to insert the CD
from a previous version.

He does not want to do a clean install because he would lose all his
settings.

Does anyone know why his Windows XP CD will not recognize existing
installation? Is his motherboard known to have the bad electrolytic
capacitors that fail prematurely? Is there a Windows newsgroup
where I should ask this question?

Thank you in advance for all replies.

It seems he has an upgrade version of XP. The install is
looking for an older qualifying windows version, such as
Win2K or 98 or ME. "msnews.microsoft.com" is the MS news
source. Go to Microsoft Public and find a Windows XP group.
There are a lot, but I don't have any on my machine so I
can't point to a specific group. The memory is probably not
ECC and the mobo manual is found at
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/Manual_Model.aspx?ProductID=1881

 

[peter]

First download SP3 from here and save it to your system
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...A8-5E76-401F-BE08-1E1555D4F3D4&displaylang=en

then read and follow the instruction here to slipstream SP3 into your XPSP2
creating a new installation CD
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/xpsp3_slipstream.asp


Using this "new" CD should allow you to do a repair installation instructions
for
which you will also find on Paul's site.

peter