Old Athlon system borked?

Zefan · 5 Feb 2006 at 16:56

Just whacked this system together for me Dad. It's all my old stuff really, but with his HDD from his old PC.

AthlonXP 2400-M
DFI Lanparty Ultra B
2*512 Crucial
40gb old maxtor (IDE)
Superflower Quad-Fan 520w PSU
GeForce3 Ti200.

His system USED to be
Athlon 1800
384 SDRam
The 40GB HDD
Rubbish litle micro ATX mobo
Rubbish old PSU.
GeForce3 Ti200

It used to work fine before I changed the mobo, cpu, psu and RAM. Now I can TO stuff in the bios etc but cannot get into windows. If I configure the boot devices myself in order of HDD-0, CD-ROM, Floppy all I get is "BOOT DISK ERROR, PLEASE ENTER DISK AND PRESS ENTER". If I let the bios load it's "Optimised defaults" then it gets to the Windows splash screen with the loading bar and almost straight away BSOD's and resets.

This to me means that it's a RAM problem, but the RAM worked before with the same CPU, Mobo and PSU

. Anyone care to give any advice as how to get this BEAST running?

BigDom · 5 Feb 2006 at 16:58

You'll need to re-install windows, and probably format the disk. Sounds like a mix of the way the HDD was configured in your dad's PC and just general drivers issues.

Zefan · 5 Feb 2006 at 16:59

Surely my board can just boot an IDE disk? It was running a SATA previously, but I can't find anything in the bios that may help.

BigDom · 5 Feb 2006 at 17:01

Oh it can boot it but it's possible the settings that where used on your dad's pc where not the default ones or the same default ones your mobo is picking up. All the head's tracks sectors etc. stuff that long time PCers will be familiar with but aren't normally worried about these days.

Zefan · 5 Feb 2006 at 17:05

Odd tbh. Luckily it's partitioned well - would just reformatting the system drive (C) and reinstalling windows correct this, thus saving the rest of the data that's on the drive?

sniperpenguin · 5 Feb 2006 at 17:20

Yep, a reinstall would be fine.

the DISK BOOT ERROR usuall occurs when the MBR (master boot record) of the drive is corrupted / deiiferent from expected. There are plenty of things you can do to alter this, but if a clean install is possible without grief, do it that way. (Personally, I would delete / recreate the C:\ partition during the install, but that is just me)

As a final attempt, boot into safe mode (if possible) and remove every single thing you can from device manager (Do not reboot if prompted). Once youve removed everything you can, reboot the machine and Windows often boots up fine, albeit with a massive list of driver installs

|Ric| · 5 Feb 2006 at 18:36

if you insert the windows xp cd you can do a repair install, it will reinstall new windows files over the old so you will have all the required files and be able to boot

You will have a few old files kicking around but it is deinitely the easiest option and you won't lose any old settings

BigDom · 5 Feb 2006 at 18:49

|Ric| said:
if you insert the windows xp cd you can do a repair install, it will reinstall new windows files over the old so you will have all the required files and be able to boot

You will have a few old files kicking around but it is deinitely the easiest option and you won't lose any old settings

Might not work and when changing that much hardware not a sensible choice. Most likely end up with an underperforming system, if a working one at all.

m3csl2004 · 5 Feb 2006 at 21:42

dont load optimised defaults - its probably setting your ram timings to tight or something along those lines

just use hdd as boot device and dont use floppy or cd rom and see what happens

btw - does you dfi have th ecold boot isssue at all?