Odyssey of upgrade..This aint pretty at all :( Your opinion?

[Striker]

Hello there,
since I m sitting at work doing practically nothing (at this time of the day), I thought I d share with you some advice that came from my odyssey of upgrade last night.

Advice: Never, ever press reset when WinXP recognise all the new hardware of the PC.

The problem with my case was that, accidentally, when first booted with my new rig into win XP (NOT a clean install...had even kept the Cats 2.4 I used with my old 7200), I hadnt connected the PS/2 keyboard but the USB one I had.
Result: Win started detecting other devices, stopped the procedure because it presented me with a "New hardware wizard" for the onboard sound, and the USB keyboard wasnt enabled yet..

(The system, btw, is an Athlon XP 2000+, paired with a HIS Radeon 9500 Pro, 512 mb samsung ddr ram, a new DVD-rom from Pioneer, and a Gigabyte 7-VA mobo. Having kept my WD 40 GB JB hd and my Live! 1024 from the old toaster..umm..old pc I mean).

I was forced to reset the machine at that point. Major mistake.

When XP ran the checkdisk at system boot that usually runs when you have pushed the lil "Reset" button, it found...

umm...around 290 MB of files being in lost chains, corrupted and I dont know what else..

This being the cause, I saw more BSOD with STOP errors yesterday than I had ever seen on my Win 98 SE for a year (ok, in 2 yrs win 98 produce more BSODs ) )...Most referencing:
"PFN_LIST_CORRUPT" or something similar.

Despite the BSOD's, the system was running adequately well...I had tried to run 3DMark2001SE to compare the score to the one my old toaster was giving, but it kicked me to the desktop shortly after Test1 in low detail finished.

I then decided to dl and install the Cats 3.1 with their cpanel, (I had DX 8.1 installed), and then dl DX 9 to see some results..

I dled the POWERED BY ATI Cats 3.1 (Hmm...Those are the ones I should always dl since the card is made from HIS, right?)

Installed them...rebooted...

System never worked correctly from this point onwards...The drivers kept appearing as "wrongly installed" and all the ati_something.vxd, .sys and all were auto-truncated from the next on-boot checkdisk that occured.

Right now, after about 5 attempts to install the drivers, to no avail (tried the drivers from the HIS cd, too), the system boots using the standard VGA driver, at 4-bit colour (and looks more than awful)

The pagefile.sys was affected as well, and as a result in 2-3 boots the free space of the HD dropped from 8 GB to 2.4 GB...Not a good sign eh?

Seeing it as my last chance to save the system (as it corrupted my mozilla mail config files too, and I lost all my emails), I run System Restore and tried to restore the PC to the status it was before trying to change video drivers from 2.4 to 3.1 .

Restore failed.

The PC still works, but this is the second disappointment from my upgrade, after the first ( I hadn't moved the jumper of the mobo from 100 MHz to 133 MHz and the CPU initially showed a 1.28 GHz speed...Now its 1.7 GHz, but the rest of the system isnt at top notch condition exactly).

I d like an opinion here:

This was a dreadful experience that I wouldnt like to have to go through again...Its not the mobos fault (apparently), and not the cards' fault...This god-damn RESET screwed the whole rig up.

Do you think that once I format the HD and perform a clean install of WinXP Pro, that the system (normally) will run flawlessly? I dont care about any minor glitches, but...This was a real nightmare, seeing XP BSOD'ing 15 or so times in an hour..Its a horror story more than an experience.

Any advice will be MUCH appreciated...Damn, and I was so glad to get 150 or so FPS in the first car chase test of 3Dmark, when I used to get...30 or 40 with the old toaster...

Thanks in advance for your time spent in reading this.

Regards,
John.

 

[horvendile]

Admittedly, I sort of skimmed some parts of your text, but it seems to me that

a) There is no indication that any hardware is at fault, right? Only WinXP making noise.

b) You don't give the impression of having any really important data on the hard drive - at least, you didn't say you have.

If that is correct, by all means, reformat! Or at least remove lost files, delete XP and reinstall. What do you have to lose?
Though theoretically it is possible to stick an old Windows installation into a new machine, I've never actually seen it happen with success and / or without pain.

 

[Striker]

Yeah...you re probably right

I suppose I ll just back up all my mp3 and my work (remember, system works, drivers dont) and go with a fresh installation..Might as well try NTFS this time, instead of FAT32.


Thanks for the opinion

edit: I just remembered this was my first post here..Nice way to start posting.
I ve been visiting those forums every day for 3 months now, and registered yesterday..oh well.

 

[bystander]

Though theoretically it is possible to stick an old Windows installation into a new machine, I've never actually seen it happen with success and / or without pain.

Just to say I've managed to put an old Windows XP installation onto a completely new machine (well it had a new CPU, MB, RAM and gfx card) with success. And to top it off Windows XP didn't bluescreen on me once!

Do you think that once I format the HD and perform a clean install of WinXP Pro, that the system (normally) will run flawlessly? I dont care about any minor glitches, but...This was a real nightmare, seeing XP BSOD'ing 15 or so times in an hour..Its a horror story more than an experience.

If you have managed to get all your important data off your hard drive, then reformat. After all you have nothing to lose trying it.

On a related note my current system has Windows XP installation on one partition and the rest of my other stuff on separate partitions. That way if my OS gives me grief I can reformat and reinstall without having to worry about losing any important data. I hope that helps.

 

[Tahir2]

Also Ghost is an absolute life saver..
From what you have said though it is possible your Hard Drive became damaged in some way. To test this, partition your drive using FDISK and set it up how you want and then format each partition. If it wont format successfully time for a new hard drive.. otherwise continue with installing XP.

P.S. Once you install NTFS you will not be able to use DOS (command prompt etc whatever) using any bootup disks as they cannot read/see NTFS partitions.