PCA Forums

Doing an upgrade and no luck installing XP. It stalls on the Setup screen at: the very end of the first prompt when it says: Loading windows. I have tried clearing CMOS, removing the battery overnight, nothing. I am an Intel Guy but two AMD puters have been kicking my ass all weekend long.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks. here are the specs:

ABIT KT7A
Athon 1200
1 stick PC133 512MB
New 300GB IDE Seagate
Old 60GB IDE
1 Netgear PCI NIC
1 SB Live Sound Card
1 NVidia 5200 Vid Card

Maybe it's the SB LIve?

Do you get as far as the upgrade compatibility report?

Upgrades from older Win9x OSes to XP don't always go smoothly. Win2K to XP USUALLY goes smoother, but not always. As a general rule of thumb upgrades are not a good idea unless you have no choice - a clean install is better.

Some tips:

- You should have Internet access during the upgrade and you SHOULD allow XP to download the latest Upgrade compatibility data. It should perform a scan of your system and tell you what devices and apps are incompatible with XP. You need to uninstall those apps and devices before the upgrade.

- System MUST be 100% clean - no spyware, no viruses, no silly background apps, and uninstall your anti-virus (re-install it afterwards). Temporarily disable any background apps you don't need. You usually have to uninstall your printer drivers if they have a taskbar icon running all the time and then install the XP version afterwards.

- Disconnect ALL USB devices and pull ALL cards except the vid card. You may also need to disable onboard devices from the BIOS menu like NICs, sound card, firewire if you continue having problems. XP gets bitchy during upgrades if it can't find the right drivers.

Sometimes despite all this it still doesn't work and you need to do a clean install.

And I'd definately pull the SBlive. They're notorious for PCI IRQ issues. Reinstall it afterwards if you want, but frankly you're better off with whatever on-board sound the mobo has. Use that SBLive for a doorstop.

Hope this helps...

thanks guys new HD to install on so no upgrading it is an attampt of a clean install. I have only a USB mouse connected on a PS2 adapter as far as USB is concerned I'll pull the SB Live and see if that helps. Noonboard sound on this unit so I will have to install it back in later. Updates to come....

Ok finally got some time tonight I pulled the SBLive and still same problem......Ugh!, any more suggestions?

stalls usualy tells me files are screwed up on HDD(corrupt sectors) or from the CD(scratchs/thumb prints). Could be a scratch or something,a better cd drive "might help"if your using 4xor 8x cdrom.
you should have taken out all cards except video not just the audio(use a pci vid if you have one)... and if you meant you had a previous OS like FP mentioned then thats the file error. Doing an OS update is never a good idea for longterm use.

New 200GB HD and 48XCDRW, I just used the same CD to install winblows on another PC with no issue. I have to get this damn PC outta here, it's getting on me nerves =/

Originally posted by Badmojo
stalls usualy tells me files are screwed up on HDD(corrupt sectors) or from the CD(scratchs/thumb prints). Could be a scratch or something,a better cd drive "might help"if your using 4xor 8x cdrom.
you should have taken out all cards except video not just the audio(use a pci vid if you have one)... and if you meant you had a previous OS like FP mentioned then thats the file error. Doing an OS update is never a good idea for longterm use.

(use a pci vid if you have one)

This did the trick. Thanks god I still had one around!!

Hmm, if the vid card was causing the problem I'd be concerned that something is wrong with it or you have incorrect BIOS settings for it.

Make sure that "Video Shadow RAM" and "Video Caching" are disabled in BIOS. These are legacy settings meant for older vid cards and they'll cause problems.

If it's an AGP card then make sure that the AGP Aperature is set to the default (usually 64Mb). Anything else can cause lockups.