XP Booting Problem

Hey everyone,

I have just bought the following components from ebuyer and build the PC myself but I am having a few issues.

Motherboard - Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 Nvidia NF4 ATX
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 (ADA4200BVBOX) X2 4200+ socket 939 Dual Core 2.2ghz
RAM - 2 x Corsair (CMX512-3200C2PT) 512MB, DDR400 / PC3200
Graphics card - Leadtek WinFast GeForce 7900GT Extreme 520MHz 256MB
HD - Western Digital WD740GD 74GB "Raptor" 10,000RPM SATA/150 8MB Cache
PSU - Enermax FMA series EG565AX-VE(W) 535W

I can usually install XP ok (although it sometimes blue screens after the 1st restart) but when I try and boot it up after the install I get a blue screen (or sometimes a random restart) just before the windows loading screen. This happens 8/10 times. Ive tried home and pro versions of XP, ive run an extreme disk check in safe mode (during one of the rare times i managed to get in!) and Ive also run a chkdsk in the XP recovery mode. I tried installing onto an older IDE hard drive and also using a different CD Drive but I just get the same problems. I updated the bios and disabled everything un-needed for an install and a first boot such as most on-board ports. I also tried swaping the RAM sticks around and trying it with just one and then the other one and also ran memtest. Still the same problems.

As I mentioned before I get the same problems when booting into safe mode but if it does crash, the last file it loads is mup.sys. The most common blue screen has a message about pagein where its non_paged or something like that.

I tried downloading the beta 64 bit version of windows vista but that brings up an error about communicating with a component right at the beginning of the installation so I didnt get far!

The only thing I can think of is that it is either a motherboard or a graphics card fault which both seem unlikely as they are new parts but its the only thing left! As soon as I get hold of one I am going to try it with another PCI-e or PCI graphics card and see what happens.

Anyone had any similar problems or ideas for a solution?

Thanks for you time,

Adam

Could be a MB fault...before blaming it on hard to diagnose hardware failure, I would try running memtest86 and WD's Diagnostic utlities, to check that your mem and HD are kosher.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Ive run memtest for a few hours and it didnt pick up any errors. What are WD's Diagnostic utlities? Where can i get them from?

Adam

The WD had tools are here http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

If you cant boot into Windows you'll need the DOS floppy or CD versions which you'll need to prep on a machine thats working.

one quick question, when you reinstalled, did you delete and recreate the parttion within Windows setup as it could be a corrupt file system structure (perhaps there was a prob with the formatting on the first attempt.)