tman70

I am trying to do a clean install of xp home on a 20 gig drive in a Dell Millennia. It installs and goes to the splash screen with the moving blue bar and then, instead of the windows starting screen, the screen goes black. I can open it in safe mode and all my settings look to be the same as on this hard drive. Device manager and display are all the same. I removed the display driver in device manager and rebooted and it opened normally and I did the windows update. But when I shut down and booted back up I had the black screen. This HD which is a cloned copy of xp home works, but the othe

My daughter-in-law called last night with a problem about her new notebook. I think it is a HP. It was given to her for her job. That is all I know about the specs other than it is running XP. It is set to run on wireless I believe because she said she could pick up MCDonalds wireless that is several hundred feet behind her house. Anyway she has an old HP desktop that is on Verizon DSL. She was trying to hook the DSL up to her Notebook and had run the DSL install cd. But when it booted up all she could get was her wallpaper and she could not get it to do anything. The taskbar would flash and

I got my other Dell Millennia(same mobo and everything else) and hooked up my w98se HDD in it with just a single cable. It was detected by the bios and booted right up. Shut down and removed cable and tried both of the (bad?)Master/slave cables and neither one would let the W98se HDD be detected by the bios. Got another master/slave cable and tried it. It detected the HDD and is running now. Also my XP Home HDD on the other Dell Millennia is booting up and running every time, so far. So could the controller on both Dell's be bad? Possibly, since I do have two HDD's bad and two bad cables, b

Go figure---3 HDD's failing at the same time. The good news right now is that all powermax tests says that the 13 gig with 98se on it is error free. I have it working on the Dell Millennia now. I guess I will have to keep using my 98se until I can get another HD on which to install xp home.

That might depend on what kind of dirt. Some dirt is better than other dirt. (LOL) I decided to clean the 30 gig and install xp home fresh on it. Could not complete install as I kept getting error codes or after rebooting several times I was back to not having it detected in the bios. I went back to my 15 gig, with the cloned copy of xp home, and it booted up twice and worked fine. But then the next reboot it would not get detected in the bios either. I could only get it to show if I hooked the cleaned 30 up as a slave. But it would not complete the opening. Then I got an error message about

Yeah----you are right chappy. Every test I have run says the ram is good, the 40, 30, 15 gig hd are good. Last night the same thing happened again. I started getting bsod. I would shut down and when I would reboot the hd's would not be detected. I removed the power cable and all the other cables and then the cmos battery and the bios chip. I even held the power button to discharge the power. After a few minutes I hooked everything back up and still no hd detected. So I unhooked everything again including the cmos battery, then I took it outside and started to throw it on the driveway. Instea

Thanks Chappy, I thought that was what you were talking about. I have tried that, but can only change it in large or normal mode, which gives me a "no operating os". I have reinstalled xp home on the 15 gig, but still get a black screen after the xp splash screen with the moving bar. I think it is a display setting, but It won't open to let me change it. Trying one last time I used xxclone to clone the cloned copy of xp home I had on the 30 gig to the 15 gig. Well---It worked and it boots up fine. Now the 40 gig after I used "Boot & Nuke" to try to start over and reinstall w98se is not rec

How do you do that? I can move around in the bios, but am not familiar with that.

I have given up on the 40 gig and the 15 gig that had 98se on it. I have tried everything suggested here and what I can find on google and MS. I have set the 40 as master &/or slave and copied the hal.dll from the 30 to the 40 and still get the bsod about unmountable_boot_volume. I have tried each of these separately and together on the 40 gig: 1--copy hal.dll from cd and/or 30 gig 2--copy ntldr from cd and/or 30 gig 3--copy ntdetect.com from cd and/or 30 gig 4--booted to repair and ran it a--ran chkdsk /r b--ran chkdsk /p c--ran fixmbr d--ran fixboot I have fdisked and f

This is where I am at now. The 30 gig cloned copy is booting up and working. The main 40 gig won't boot up. I get a dos screen that gives me several options but no matter which one I choose it always brings me back to the dos screen. It is a continuous loop. I have manage to get the blue screen that says I have an "unmountable_boot_volume". Another screen says it is missing the "windows root>\system32\hal.dll". What is the procedure to install that dll? I can't get the cd to work except in safe mode.

This purely seems like a hardware problem, I don't see how XP would factor in. I think it was just more of a coincidence. The motherboard just seems flakey. edit added later// could your cmos battery be going bad? I just tried another bios chip that I had updated for a spare. Same results. The cmos battery is a year old. I have a new one that I could try. I also have a spare Dell Millennia that I could change out the motherboard and see if that is the problem. What on the motherboard would possibly cause this type of problem?

Well, it started again this morning. I can't get the bios to read the two hd's. It won't even let me set it back to run the w98se hd. It seemed to be working fine when I shut down last night. I can't even get it to boot up with the cd. I did see a blue screen that flashed on and I thought that it said something about the bios. I think it said the bios chip needed to be updated. If that is the case, then I have the latest chip already. I guess the chip can not handle Wxp and that is my problem. I am now back to using my old Gateway with an 8 gig hd with w98se on it.

I don't know which is worse!! An intermittent computer problem or a leaky water line. Especially if both happen at the same time. I think I have the water leak fixed. As for the cable I will have to wait and see on that one. So far everything is working fine.

I don't know what has happened, but I am now able to access the 40 gig hd. I was working with the w98 hd and then it froze and I had to do a hard shutdown. When it came back up I could not access any programs even though I could find them. Example I could find the program file folder, but it was blank, even though it showed the correct number of progams at the bottom. I then hooked up the 40 gig and reset the cmos and put the cd in the cdrom. This time it booted up and let me open up all programs and files in xp. I have removed cd and so far it is still booting up into wxp. Does any of this ma

Yes, I had it set as cdrom drive first boot. I then changed it to run 98. Then after still trying to run xp I tried the 98 hd again and it would not detect it until I set cmos to default settings. I am using w98 hd to reply to this. The 40 and 30 hd for xp still will not be detected in bios so I can not get passed error "primary hd not detected".

This week, after being gone for a month, I returned home and was working on my Dell Millennia on which I had previously installed xp home. I was updating all my programs and xp home. Everything was working fine. I could turn it off and on with out any problems. Yesterday after running all my virus and adware scans I used xxclone to make a backup on an extra 30 gig hd. I removed it from the computer and set the primary slave to none in the bios and set the ide hdd auto detection to detect the 40 gig hdd and then saved settings and finished booting. Everything checked out ok. I then shut down a

Thanks Sultan I'll check them out later. Right now I have found a little tool called xxclone. I have tried it and it seems to be just what I needed(as in free). It has a simple interface and was easy to operate after reading the help file. I ran it and it cloned the C drive to the F drive and had a screen to make it bootable after it was finished cloning. I tried it as a master and it booted right up without any problems. It can be found here: www.xxclone.com If anyone has tried it and has any comments, I would like to hear about them. As a 2 day newbie to XP Home I guess I am doing good.

Thanks Shanenin but it looks like the free copy is no longer available and I can't afford to pay for one right now.

I have finally been able to save enough money to get a copy of XP Home and have installed it on my Dell Millennia. Any problems I have run into have been solved fairly easily and I am able to find where everything is-compared to W98se. I have all my settings and programs the way I want. One problem I have is that I cannot make a clone to another HD. Having at times lost all my information to power failure and/or HD crash, or a bad download, I used xxcopy to clone everything in W98 to another HD so I would have a replacement if it ever happened again. I would just replace it as a master and go.

That sounds like the answer. I now remember reading about that somewhere, someplace but can't remember where or when. Maybe the old techtv boards? Thanks

House has carpet. Computer sits on table. All outlets are grounded according to code. We live in the south. My son is a man taking care of his disabled parents and yes we wear socks on the carpets. Never have had any problem with any type of static electricity in the 20+ years we have lived here. Certainly none in the last several years that we have had several different computers. I am tending to agree with JDoors and think it could be chip. But is it a one time deal or something that will happen again? My reason for posting was/is twofold. First to help someone who may run into this problem

I thought about a ground strap, but like shanenin said it should be under warranty. Son said he had to call in some information because the store had not. It should still have manufacturer's warranty. Liz, glad someone else has at least heard of the procedure. If I can find a fix I will post it.

This is general information purposes for those that have a Compaq Presario SR1012NX. My son's new computer suddenly lost internet connection. Other computer was fine. Tried the repair feature in Wxp, but it did not help. Called Compaq and after speaking with several people in India, finally got someone who understood what we were saying and was able to give us technical help to solve the problem. Apparently the unit builds up a static charge, for some reason, inside the unit and has to be discharged. He had us unplug the unit from the power source and then hold down the power button for 30 s

I have got the CDRW 48x to burn and read cd's, also my DVD Rom works with WMPlayer Classic on my Dell Millennium. I did a clean install, with all updates, on the Gateway Essential 500c using the Gateway disk's that came with the unit. The CDRW works ok, however the WMPlayer Classic gives me this reading: ?/????r::?3D ! ??????????????)?::?t ???????::?tdi! Media Type 0: -------------------------- Audio: PCM 48000Hz stereo 1536Kbps AM_MEDIA_TYPE: majortype: MEDIATYPE_Audio {73647561-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71} subtype: MEDIASUBTYPE_PCM {00000001-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71} formattype: FORMAT_

Sounds interesting. What do you mean by that? The Gateway has been nothing but problems. I thought I would do a clean install of W98se on a spare drive and use the Gateway disks. When I got to setup I got a "cdr101: not ready reading drive E. Then I tried another drive that I had cloned from the Gateway and got a "load error". I then read that the load error could be a bad MBR. So I tried the "fdisk/mbr". When I rebooted W98se loaded,so I cleaned out everything I had put into the Win\command file: autoexe.bat, config.sys, Idecd.sys and rebooted. After it loaded I tried a test cd in the cdr