Troubleshooting help, quick!

M

Morazl

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2003
Messages
1,147
I am reformatting an very old HP Pavilion 8500
P3 450mhz
256 PC100 (added 128)
don't know what size the HDD is
some sound card/modem

OK, my problem is this. originally i was told the FDD was dead and needed to be replaced, no problem, fixed it. I was told the CD drive could be faulty, didn't take a chance, swapped it out.

I pop in a windows xp cd, all is fine, i get to a screen that says "setup is starting windows" and the system hangs. I figure it's not big thing, reboot and as it is reloading all the system files, an error comes up and states, ntfs.sys is corrupt. I reboot and try again, this time I get a BSOD.

I burn a fresh copy of XP and put it in the drive, no it wont even boot from the disc and it goes straight to booting to the hard drive that doesn't have an OS on it, I've messed with jumper settings, and bios settings... the bios is very old, yet I've never flashed a bios nor do I know how to (could this be the problem?)

I've been working on this all night and I swear I've reformatted over 100 PC's, why is this old slug so difficult?!

Please, if anyone has any input, reply.
 
is there an option for it to boot from CD in the BIOS? If not, you'll need a good ol' '98 bootdisk. Or the ultimate boot disk would work, too.
 
yea, there is an option, and like I said, It did boot from the disk already.
 
Download, burn and run Memtest 86+. The last time I saw a "ntfs.sys is corrupt" message, it was bad RAM. So run Memtest for at least three hours, max 24 hours and if even a single error shows up, than it's the RAM thats your problem. OH and run Memtest on each stick of RAM separately.
 
Danny Bui said:
Download, burn and run Memtest 86+. The last time I saw a "ntfs.sys is corrupt" message, it was bad RAM. So run Memtest for at least three hours, max 24 hours and if even a single error shows up, than it's the RAM thats your problem. OH and run Memtest on each stick of RAM separately.
Click to expand...

time to research how to do that, lol.
 
Run memtest overnight. Then run some drive diagnostic tools from the manufacturers website.
 
Memtest is running, I guess my XP is corrupt! Looks like we'll have to burn a new one, thanks dudes.
 
ram has lifetime warranty! unless its part of an oem system, lol. anyhow, i've got some 128 sticks layin around, pm me if interested. I'll edit this post when I find them, lol.
 
it's got 2 dimms and its an old ass hp, im not even going to mess with it since i realy dont have any spare time for another RMA :( i'm just going to go to best buy and pick up a 256 stick.

thanks for your interest though!
 
Dude, they're gonna charge you like $50 for that old pair of RAM. Try to find it here on the boards from someone. Someone like enginurd...
 
lol, its cool... it saves me the trouble of having to find the ram, lol.
 
OK, still having problems I purchased some more RAM after running memtest i concluded the stick of ram i added was faulty.

However, I burned a FRESHEY FRESH copy of XP and it still did not give me the "press any key to boot from cd..."

The CD drive works because I ran memtest from a cd.. yeah?

What could it possibly be?!

edit: i have no idea how my xp image could be corrupt, i haven't moved it and I use it all the time...

just used it the other day as a matter of fact.
 
How about that other disc that you tried, that actually started the installation?
 
I will try that one again, although it does have some minor scratches.

As to your new TV request in the sig, I just picked up a Westinhouse 1080P 37" display, there is a sticky about it in the displays thread, I am in love with it, it makes a GREAT monitor.
 
update: I put in the old cd with some scratches and so far it's gotten to the copying files part, damn that's weird.
 
hehe... but those scratches may have been the reason the installation failed in the first place... though, we'll see soon enough.

As for the Westy37, yah, I was lookin into it, but I'm replacing a 53", so I'm lookin for something a bit bigger.
 
everything works great, didn't even need to find any drivers, xp had them all. Thanks for all your help.

53"? Damn! why upgrade? old tv?
 
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