New system won't boot windows.

[Chris Martin]

Alright, got the new system up and running. I plugged my hard drive into
another computer, took off what I wanted, burned a few archive CD's, saved
the music, of course, etc., etc, then put the harddrive back into the new
system.

Format, install windows, find hardware, walla. I've had some glitches, but
I'm fixing them one at a time.

Again, lots to read, sorry people, mostly success, a bit of failure that I
would love input on.

The system is now:

AMD XP 2500+ (OC'ed to 3200).
1 GB Corsair low latency 2700 ddrram (2X512 twinx)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy 2zs Platinum
40gig WD hard drive.

First problem I had was: I could not for the life of me find the CD that
came with my sound blaster.. if anyone has this CD, i'll throw some money at
you have it in your heart to either mail me a copy or burn me an ISO..
please.. creative's site has was down for a few days, not only that, but
when it is up, there isn't a single encompassing file for the drive, it's 11
or so small ones, and I just know I'm gonna mess something up. I have the
front drive with the remote and all, so I need to get that working again.

Second problem, I couldn't find my windows key, so I used a hacked one (I
know, bad). Of course, SP1 didn't want to upgrade because it was illegal, I
could understand that, fair enough.. then I found my key! So I changed my
key, and it doesn't want to install it now.. not because of an illegal key,
but because I downloaded the network version of SP1, hoping it wouldn't
check the key and just do the installation offline.. it checked the key.
But it didn't upgrade, and now whenever I attempt to get SP1 it starts it,
already has the 1.9 mb download, starts running the install, then just stops
and says something like "the install was not complete".. no error number or
anything to look up.

Follow up on this one - think I might have gotten it working.. cleared
out the WUTEMP folder (windows update), so it had to redownload it's
installer, it's gotten further this time, so we'll see.

Thirdly, (a success so far), games like Command and Conquer - Generals, and
Everquest were freezing. I thought it was because of the overclocking, but
it just happened faster when I overclocked it, so I did some research and
found out about some instabilities in the way ATI was handling the AGP.. so
I flipped a few manual settings on and off and, walla, no more freezing (so
far, played a hell of a lot longer then I had before and haven't gotten a
freeze yet). So I just pushed the overclocking back up, we'll see how that
goes.

Fouthly, thank you. I really do appreciate all of the posts and suggestions
you all have made. That boot disk with all the utilities on it, I burned
the ISO and it's a great disk, very helpful (wasn't for me in this case, but
I can certainly see myself using it in the future).

~Chris

PS - Really, about that creative CD, if anyone knows where I can get an ISO
or another CD (would creative send me another??), I'd appeciate it.

 

[Sheldon Roger]

When you put in new hardware and leave in old drives the OS is still looking
for the old hardware because the drivers are all there for the old
motherboard and its features as well as any onboard stuff. Without doing
anything to change this information it is even possible to get a Windows
Protection error but in any case it is not surprising that it doesn't finish
booting. If you must have the hard drives exactly as they are at least get
a brand new hdd and make it the primary drive and do a fresh format and OS
install on it. If for any reason you cannot do this then the other option
is what you don't want to do.

As a last resort there is another way to proceed which I have used
twice in transferring to a new computer. It involves using NTbackup. I
have an external USB drive which makes the process simpler. The steps
are:

1. Make an NTbackup of the original system to external media.
2. Install windows XP on the new computer.
3. On the new computer install the original NT backup data from the
old computer which will overwite your data but won't if you're
fortunate displace the new hardare configuration.

This procedure used to be in the MSKB Article 314070 but was later
removed.

Quote from the article--"Windows Backup (NTbackup.exe) can handle
differences in hardware configuration information between computers
and maintain critical registry entries that are unique to the computer
to which you are migrating information, This capability means that you
can migrate to new hardware by performing a full backup of the source
computer and then restoring the backup over a fresh installation of
windows XP on the destination computer".

My second use of this method involved going from a Via chipset system
to an Nvidia chipset and went without a hitch. The fact that the
article was removed from the KB probably indicates that the method
isn't always successful. Also you will need the original key from the
first setup.