Weird PC restart

bombidol

Ok folks. just bought an upgrade bundle from komplett and it arrived today. MB, CPU and RAM.

Hooked it all up with a 40 GB HD with XP installed on it. Heres the thing. the HD with XP on it works fine in another Machine.
but on this one that i just made it gets to a certain point then a blue screen pops up for a fraction of a second then the machine restarts.


any ideas?

its annoying me now.
All the screws from the case to the MB have the rubber ringers on em, just incase iit was something electrical.
tried different Ram and different HD's in this case but it keeps happening


Thanks

The Muppet

bombidol wrote:

Ok folks. just bought an upgrade bundle from komplett and it arrived today. MB, CPU and RAM.

Hooked it all up with a 40 GB HD with XP installed on it. Heres the thing. the HD with XP on it works fine in another Machine.
but on this one that i just made it gets to a certain point then a blue screen pops up for a fraction of a second then the machine restarts.


any ideas?

its annoying me now.
All the screws from the case to the MB have the rubber ringers on em, just incase iit was something electrical.
tried different Ram and different HD's in this case but it keeps happening


Thanks

It doesn't work like that mate, well not very often anyway. You will have to reinstall your new System from scratch so that it can find all the new hardware. You may get it to work if you are using the corporate edition of XP but if it's xp home your fighting an uphill battle.

bombidol

Its XP Pro. I tried installing XP on the HD while it was in the new system but it kept freezing up. so i whipped it into another machine.
Its not even getting to Windows before it restarts though. Its just as the XP splash screen would be due to come up.

cdebru

try stripping the new system down to the minimum to install windows

take out anything you dont need to install windows soundcards extra hd extra dvd/cd drives etc
if it installs then start adding the other stuff stuff back in

the install of windows from the other setup wont work unless it was the same mobo it might

duridian

To do this you must begin Windows setup while the hard drive is still in the older system. Boot from the XP cd and choose repair, leave hard drive files system as it is (or you will lose your settings and data), now during the first restart switch off immediately when it has just come on again (pull the plug outta the wall or whatever). This is important because the next stage after restart is hardware detection so you don't want it redetecting the old hardware again. Now while it is stopped transfer the hard disk to the new system. Let it boot from the hard drive and windows setup should continue but detecting the hardware of the new system! Continue with setup as normal now and it should keep all your programs and settings same as before but now running on different hardware. This is the only way I have managed to get an XP or 2000 install to continue working on with major hardware changes such as motherboard and cpu. Hope it works for you.

Inspector Gadget

The repair procedure duridian outlined is definitely the way to go. NT-based flavours of Windows (NT, Win2K, XP) have a distinct dislike to being moved from one chipset to another, particularly from one IDE controller to another, it seems - at least that's where I've experienced the aforementioned BSOD cropping up earlier. (Say you take a working XP install from a machine with a VIA chipset, and connect it to a board with an nVidia chipset - it'll almost invariably go kerboom). I don't do much with XP, but I've never had to do the "quick, plug it out!!!" thing that duridian has suggested, though; maybe that's peculiar to XP's installer.

If the XP install process was locking up on the new target machine, however, it doesn't bode well for the overall stability of the box. I strongly suggest you run Memtest (or similar) over it in particular to check that your RAM is okay, and try to check your temps, that all of the installed fans are running, and that you're not trying to run a monster rig on a tiddly power supply. Check that you've seated all of your PCI/AGP cards and DIMMs fully too.

(I know that you've already tried different lumps of RAM, but I got caught rotten recently by an NForce 3 250GB chipset that simply didn't like two sticks of TwinMOS PC3200 that passed *every* Memtest check time and time again in another machine (VIA chipset), but calfed consistently on two tests in the NForce board - similarly specced Corsair Value S stuff worked first time. Also check the recommended placement of DIMMS in the manual (i.e. which banks to put them into) - again, (at least some of) these NForce 3 boards seem to be fussy about certain bank/RAM speed combinations - this, for all I know, could also apply to other platforms that I haven't had to deal with yet...)

Hope this helps,
Gadget

bombidol

thanks. Theres basically nothing in the box. everything at the moment is onboard. its a 300Watt PSU. Other than the mobo its just a HD and a CDrom.

Ill try that stuff out and see

bombidol

sort it out. i kept tryin different ram and it worked. Now im left with some dodgey ram from from Komplett. nice

Inspector Gadget

If the memory is identifiably FUBAR (e.g. fails Memtest diagnostics in more than one computer) then send it back - I returned some TwinMOS PC3200 stuff to Komplett and (after paying the difference, and having some engineer type there agree with my hypothesis) got nice, shiny (working) Corsair stuff back...

Hope this helps,
Gadget