Posted: 8/28/2008 4:31:29 AM EDT
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My old computer shit the bed after a lightening strike took out the motherboard. No big deal...the computer was about 6 years old anyways and the wife has been complaining we need a new one for a while. So I order a new motherboard, 4gb of RAM, quad core Athlon 9850 w/ thermaltake heatsink. My hard drive, power supply, DVD drives are all fine so I'm going to canibalize them from the previous system. So I hook everything up and fire it up...turns on without a problem. I setup the BIOS and away we go. Well, I did all this hoping XP would autorecognize the new motherboard and RAM and I wouldn't need to worry about formatting or hard drive issues with the exception of maybe some motherboard driver issues. The Windows XP screen will flash up and the green scroll thing will move back and forth just like normal and then a blue screen will flash momentarily and the computer will restart and do it all over again. I can't start in safe mode as it just does the same thing. I tried repairing my hard drive, but that didn't work. I thought about repairing the master boot log/record thing, but it gave me a warning that it could change everything. I'm trying to salvage all the information on my hard drive without formatting. Any ideas? |
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that's odd that it fried your motherboard. the first thing to take the hit in a surge is the power supply. was it properly grounded? get a good backup UPS or surge protector. it's a great insurance policy if you have sensitive data on an expensive machine. try using an XP boot disk. What's happening is your HAL (hardware abstraction layer) is telling your boot sector what it has. when it boots up looking for it, your hardware doesnt respond to it's programmed firmware. the computer automatically shuts down to prevent it from damaging itself. have you reset your bios? this might help. power it down, remove the battery and wait 30 seconds. also look over your jumpers on the motherboard and make sure everything is where it should be. Usually the components you installed should be picked up by the OS and will auto install everything. the only thing you would have to do is re-register with MS because they will think that you are installing XP on a different computer because so much different hardware is being detected. open the pod bay doors hal! eta* do you hear a beep when it restarts? if so, it could be an audible trouble code from the motherboard. then you would be able to look it up in your mobo manual. |
| XP gets freaked out if you change the MB or proc, and you just did both. Go to Wal-Mart and get a cheap Western Digital HD, do a new Windows install on that, and then hook up your old hard drive as a slave. Make sure you set the jumpers on the old and new HD correctly! Once you've got the old HD set up as a slave, you can pull your stuff from it, then wipe the drive as use it as secondary storage. |
| To add more confusion to the mix...the motherboard has a handful of SATA connections, but only 1 IDE. Currently, I have 2 hard drives (160gb and 45gb) that are IDE only. I also have a CDRW and DVDRW (yes, both) that are IDE only. I know that you should have CD/DVD drives on a single IDE cable and hard drives on another if at all possible. Right now I have it setup with the DVDRW and 160gb HD on a single IDE cable. Assuming I get a SATA HD can I chain my DVDRW and 160gb on the same IDE cable as I have now, or is this part of the problem? Of course I'm going to have to find a way to pull off all the data on the 45gb HD (still not sure how I'm going to do that). I guess I could just get a large SATA HD and sell off the IDE HDs on ebay, but that sounds like a pain in the ass. |
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OK if you have two hard drives you need to do a F8 on start and see which hard drive is the first boot drive. If the bios is looking for the start-up stuff list and is looking on the second drive for it it will do exactly what you describe So do a boot drive setup and change drives and see if it picks up I would bet money it will work boot start up is F8 or F11 or F U (joke) give it a try choose the correct HD to 1st drive to boot. my 2 cents, and $3.30 will get you a grande cuppichino |
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^ if that were the case he would get an error messasge stating: "NTLDR is missing" when trying to boot from a non hard drive or hard drive with no OS. get rid of all optical drives and anything PCI such as soundcards, usb hubs, tv tuners etc... and try again. with the least amount of hardware installed possible. try going into bios and disabling on board lan, sound, and any other non essentials. one of your device drivers in causing this problem. |
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One thing you guys have missed.... the AMD Phenom 9850 is a 64 bit processor. If your old pc was 6 years old... I can bet that your XP is 32 bit. That dog won't hunt. Buy you one of these HDD for $260 One of these for your IDE HDD for $38.99 And load this version of XP for $139.99 Then you can transfer your data back to the new pc and use the external case for the IED HDD. David |
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We use these at work all the time if you just want to recover your dater Sata to IDE adapter |