Having major problems! Please help!

nero120 · 5 Apr 2006 at 01:25

Okay,

so I got my new rig the other day which consists of:

- Antec Aria Micro ATX Desktop Case
- DFI RS482 Infinity SKT939 Mobo
- AMD Athlon 64 3700 CPU
- Swiftech MCX6400-V Heatsink + Akasa Amber 80mm fan

I put it all together with some crucial 512MB 3200 RAM + Elixir 512MB 3200 RAM and the IDE hard drive and cdrom i was using in my last rig. I put in my XP setup disk and booted from it ready to install. Alas, that is where my problems started.

When setup was booting it kept giving me an error saying "The file acpi.sys is corrupted". "Oh no" I thought. So I tried a few things. First i swaped the hard drive with an old spare one, but I got the same error message as before. Then I removed the stick of elixir and tried it with just the crucial, and setup got further! It installed all of the initial files and then rebooted. However, when booting from the hd for the first time it gave me an error message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: system32\hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of this file". So I hung my head and admitted defeat.

There must be something in my system that isnt working correctly, right? My gut tells me it might be the ram that the dfi board doesnt like, but can someone give me some advice? I really dont know what could be the cause of these errors and dont know where to begin looking. Is my mobo borked? It posts fine, and i can get into the bios setup fine. I even tried installing a copy of red hat, but that hung whilst booting setup too. Not good.

Please someone help me!

semi-pro waster · 5 Apr 2006 at 11:07

Have you tried setting it up with the bare minimum needed for a Windows install e.g. motherboard, CPU, hard drive, optical and one stick of Ram? Have you tried the Ram in different slots as some motherboard are fussy not only about the type but also the placement of the Ram? Could you borrow someone elses Ram to try? I think you may be right in your suspicion about the Ram because it quite often seems to be the cause of unknown faults.

iSam · 5 Apr 2006 at 11:16

Yea change the RAM slots, I have seen loads of rigs go wrong because the mobo gets a bit fussy over the slots used.

Get back to us when you have a go.

nero120 · 5 Apr 2006 at 12:27

Okay guys, thanks i'll give a go tonite [gulp]!

I hate these types of problems!

oweneades · 5 Apr 2006 at 12:42

If that doesn't work google for DFI ram issues and you will probably be amazed at what you can find.

When I first got my board I was having some issues like you have experienced.

It turned out my board basically wasn't recognizing I had ram at all. (or at least not when I tried 2 stick in dual channel mode)

I basically tried lots of different bios's until I found one that worked.

My board is different to yours so this may not be the issue but it is a possibility and worth looking into if what you are going to try doesn't work.

nero120 · 6 Apr 2006 at 14:30

Right guys, I moved the ram to a different slot and now it seems to be working. I managed to install xp successfully and its been running fine, so all is looking good! Phew! Thanks for all your help dudes!