WinXP Home Edition Disasterpiece, HELP!

Adam

Lets start at the very beginning..... I recently pieced together a fairly top range pc, nothing too complicated, AMD 64 3000+ processor, 512MB ram, GeForce FX 5200 graphics, 40 GB seagate hard drive, philips dvd-rom and 8x Dual DVD-RW drive, all on a SiS 755-A motherboard, all brand new except the hard drive. Pieced it together, called microsoft, told a few lies and installed XP Home from a recovery cd, everything was in perfect working order.
I then connected an old hard drive to my pc in an effort to wipe it as it was shot to hell and wouldnt boot, and in the process somehow managed to format my own hard drive, which baffles me....
Anyway, rather than call microsoft and tell more lies i simply went out and bought XP Home Edition and installed it. The old hard drive was taken out of the equation beforehand by the way. After the installation, The onboard sound device (Realtek AC97) would not work, with a Code 39 error, saying the device drivers are either corrupt or missing. I tried reinstalling the drivers first from the CD supplied with the motherboard, and then from newly downloaded drivers, with the exact same results. It was working perfectly with the previous installation of XP...
On a side note, I can not install McAfee VirusScan or Firewall, just gives me uninformative error messages suggesting i reboot and try again, which doesn't help. Can't find any windows updates to alleviate any of these problems. My DVD-RW drive also behaves strangely, sometimes Windows won't detect a CD in the drive, sometimes it recognises the drive as simply a CD-ROM drive...
Thank you for being so patient as to read this far, and help will be much appreciated!

Nick_oliveri

Go pro!

Could be a new service pack or OEM distro that caused your pc to take a mouth to ass attitude. Take it back, demand a new one, format again assuming you aint got anything big and cool stored on the disk. And if that doesnt work, go and apologise to the storeman you degraded voilently. But you could keep the two Cd keys if it worked because of all the trouble you went to ( With the buying ).

Red Alert

Win 2000 doesn't have any copy protection of any kind so it might be easier to install a few times to get things right.

Adam

i got frustrated and shouted and huffed and puffed.... and reformatted the hard drive. no real loss,just boring and annoying. it remedied the audio drivers issue, but there's something deeper and more evil at work here!

basically i cantinstall anything from cds, e.g. McAfee VirusScan + Firewall, the nVidia desktop manager(dont need the drivers, they were installed off the XP cd but im workin a multiple moniter environment and cant set up anything, its just defaulted to clone....who needs to see the same image twice?!), the drivers for my auio device(had to download them), and adobe reader off the mcafee cd. I'm using a Philips PCA424D DVD-ROM and a DVD-RW IDE1008, and the same problem exists using either drive... HELP!

mad m

Seems to me you know your stuff on installing and reinstalling xp or anything else for that matter as you have outlined some of the try out solutions you've tried...have you considered it might be the motherboard...?maybe something gone flakey on it?...

Fobia

hey, this is a strange idea....but try installing a linux system on it.

Get the Fedora Core 2 cd's, put it in use the included drivers for your dvd drive, try mounting it etc, see if your sound works. If everything works fine then you know it's windows and not your hardware....if not then you do indeed have a hardware problem. If it is windows then format and start from scratch is the only surefire way.

It's similar to the installing win2k idea but that either involve more money or piracy.....and I'm against both of them .

g'luck,
que

Adam

never used linux before, i was lookin into it once, all i could determine was that there are a lot of methods of installation, should i use it on top of or instead of XP? and can you recommend a specific download? cheers

Fobia

Yes linux comes in many different packages (distrobutions).

Fedora is the easiest to install and use by far, it's like windows.....but with linux!

You should make a 10 gig partition for linux.....it's made easy by the fedora install. When you find out what the problem is you can either get rid of that partition or format the HDD completely (depending on whether it's a hardware or windows problem).

Download fedora here: http://fedora.redhat.com/download/ , use your existing windows to burn the iso's to cd, then simply put cd 1 in, turn off your comp and turn it back on again, you should be taken to the install process.

g'luck and post/pm me if you get stuck.

que