[[DAD]MeR|iN]

alrighty heres the story:

A freind of mine has a 900mhz athlon with 256 + 64(64 is stock) MB of ram Gateway(lol... i hate gateway with a passion) that cam stock with ME(worst Windows OS ever created... ) and it blew up back in mid January(as in wouldnt boot, windows was corrupted or some other other the thousands of ME problems... so instead of fixing it, a month ago, I decided i would just blow it away and install 98 SE for the time being. He runs 98 without a prob until Monday, we pop in a new wireless G card for his network at home and 98 rejects the drivers(as in random crashes, freezes etc and thne we get errors about not being able to load the drivers) So i figure i could give XP a shot, and had my old copy laying around so we decided to install that after a clean fdisk format, you know the drill... We get to installing XP, it boots and then starts copying and freezes randomly throughout the copy process, forcing us to pop the power cord out because the power button does nothing. finally after about the 5th freeze it gets everything copied and almost finishes installing XP(freezes and needs to be rebooted randomly throughout the install) and freezes hardcore on us and we get the BSOD, try again and get a dif BSOD( i will try to copy down what it says next time i am there, b/c i jsut got back and can't remmember what it said on the BSOD) so Its around 10:00 and i have school tommorrow so i left. I took his 10gig HD home and am in the process of formatting and ghosting my windows folders onto it, and we will see if it works on his comp. MY question is, what could make it randomly freeze and randomly reboot like that? is it the HD goin out, a bad stick of RAM or what? i took out either stick of RAM to check it and it still froze both times. thought it may have been a heat issue so we took a room fan and took the side off the box and pointed it point blank at the cpu. . . . no dif. Also we took out his modem, sound card and wireless card from pci slots leaving them empty thinking one of them might have been causeing probs... no dif. I am really baffled. If ghosting my windows to the HD doesnt work I am clueless on how to help him. I suggested picking up a Seagate 40gig and trying that out, he said he needed the space anyway so hes going to pick that up tommorrow sometime. I'm hoping that works. I was just wondering if any of you guys have seen anything like this? And if you have what causes the problem? (freezes during install, random reboots, BSOD, etc.) Well I will keep you posted, if you have a questions just ask and ill do my best to inform you. Its been one heck of a frustrating night, lol we have been workin on it from 3:00 to 10:00(watched 2 hrs of tv though... ) thanks a ton guys!!!!

~M

[greenman100]

The ram sounds suspect, if reseating the HSF doesn't help.

[[DAD]MeR|iN]

I am almost positive its not the seating of the HS because we didnt have any random restarts before. And it only restarts/hangs/crashes/freezes when we try to install XP. I had installed 98 without a prob. IT just will not install XP... I have heard that this problem can be caused by the Bios on the gateway mobos, one of my freinds had to flash his BIOS before it would work, but then after he flashed it it installed fine. I am trying to find any other way possible besides flashing the BIOS because i have for one never flashed a BIOS, for two if i screw the flash up, we are done dealin. Also he bought a new HD and we used the partition program seagate included to partition and format to NTFS, then we used the 6 XP floppy setup disks and they all installed and transfered their files fine, and it tells us to restart, we do and it comes up like this: NTLDR missing please restart. so in otherwords instead of starting the setup it trys to start windows which is not installed. We tried to load a dos boot disk and start setup fomr that but it kept telling us that "setup cannot be run in DOS" I am absolutely clueless. any suggestions or advice will be appreciatted.. thanks!!!!


~M