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mishspring · Joined: 01 May 2006 Posts: 1

Hello,

I have a 2-week-old home-built PC with the following configuration of brand new parts:

- ABIT AG8-V Socket-T (LGA-775) Intel 915P ATX motherboard
- Intel Pentium 4 650 Prescott
- Zalman CNPS7700-CU 120mm fan/heatsink for the chip
- Asus EAX1300Pro PCIx-16 video card
- 4 sticks of 1GB OCZ 184-pin DDR-400 (PC-3200) SDRAM
- Audigy-2 Creative SoundBlaster sound card
- 250GB SATA HDD from Seagate
- various and sundry drives (CD-RW, floppy, Zip-250, etc.)

My problem is that I can't install Windows XP Pro SP2 on this machine. I was running Windows 2000 (which installed and ran no problem), but noticed in comparison with other machines that certain activities (such as making backup copies of my DVD home movies) were taking twice as long under 2000 as they were under XP on another, slower machine.

So I bought Windows XP Pro SP2 and installed it. Immediately after the install, the machine just hangs on the initial splash screen with the moving blue bar at the bottom.

This matches the behavior described here:
http://support.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-015171.htm

and here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885626/en-us

The instructions in that second link above, on Microsoft's site, indicate that there are two components to fixing this problem:

a). updating the BIOS to a BIOS that supports Prescott C-0 processor stepping
and
b). moving the "update.sys" out of the way long enough to boot and install an update from Microsoft

I moved from version 24 to version 25 of the BIOS, and I booted into Windows 2000 and moved the update.sys out of the way just like the directions said.

Unfortunately, this did not work -- the system is still hanging on boot, exactly the same as it was before I did this.

Installing the patch (KB885626) mentioned in the Microsoft article ***didn't work either***.

XP Pro SP1 came up. It takes variously between 10 and 20 minutes to boot, but it boots. I then installed all of the drivers for my hardware configuration (everything worked fine), and tried to upgrade to SP2 with the SP2 CD. It began the upgrade process, and then froze and immediately rebooted during the "installing Devices" portion. It came back up, began a step or two before where it had left off, and boom - same thing, in the same place. It was now rebooting over and over again.

BTW, I did take out 2 of the sticks of RAM that I originally had in this box because apparently Windows won't support more than about 2-3GB of RAM, even though the motherboard will. That had no effect on my ability to load Windows XP.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated -- I am really stuck here.

Thanks!

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