Swapped out my old MB and CPU yesterday to upgrade to P4 2.8G 800fsb and now I can not get past the 're-activation' screen. I can post-up, make changes to the BIOS, but once it moves into WinXP it will re-boot at any time, the furthest being when I get the that 'check yes or no' screen saying I have made significant changes to my system and need to re-activate XP. I suppose I was naive to expect to be able to simply swap out those parts and have my PC work...I was hoping to avoid having to do a new install of XP. The new system set-up is: ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe MB P4 2.8G 800fsb Northwood (2) OCZ 256MB, 2700 DDR WD 80G 7200rpm Hard Drive WD 40G 7200rpm Hard Drive WinXP SP1 nVidia GeForce 5200 128M SB Live 5.1 Iomega Internal Zip DVD Rom CD R/RW Floppy Drive Artic Cooler CPU Fan 4 Case Fans Omega 450W PSU (came with case) I replaced: ASUS P4SDX Motherboard and P4 1.8G CPU I'd appreciate any suggestions that might help solve this problem.
When you swap motherboards, the only reliable way to make sure everything's in order is to do a clean install of windows, unfortunately.
Would it be possible to install over the previous copy of XP? Like an idiot, I did not back up the hard drive that has XP on it.
You can do this, however, once this is done, I strongly suggest you create a partition on which you will copy all your important files. After that, you can proceed with the clean installation of Windows. I suggest you create a partition with only Windows on it (at least 5gb). That way, you'll only have to format this partition for other times. You will have to reinstall all your programs and games but you won't risk losing your important files.
I took some time off, so I still have not really done anything to fix this PC. Would installing XP on a newly formatted hard drive (with the old one removed) be an acceptable solution to my problem? I would still have all of the old data on the original hard drive, and could back up the data and re-install what I need once I have XP on the fresh drive. We tried to do this once before vacation, but XP is telling me it can not install onto the new drive. I think my P/S may not be good enough to power everything and I have a new one to install before trying to install XP once again. The new P/S is a Thermaltake Silent PurePower 480W 2-Fan Power Supply, the old was a generic 450W that came with the case.
yes, it will be fine using a new formated HD to install XP, then you can copy the important files from the old hard drive...
Specifically, what error message(s) are you getting? I highly doubt the power supply is the problem. I do know that Western Digital IDE drives have some funky jumper settings. However, if they're SATA drives, then they don't have jumpers to fool with.
I do not recall the error message, it was just before I went on vacation and I set it aside due to the frustration. The error was occuring as the HD was re-formatting, I think it said something about being unable to format the drive. I do remember having the IDE cable disconnected, but not the power connection. I am going to try again with the HD completely removed. As far as jumpers, I have everything set to cable select. It is an EIDE Hard Drive.
I recommend you set your jumpers to master or slave manually instead of cable select. That may be the cause of your problem. The drive at the end of the cable is the master and should set to : master w/ slave. The other drive should be set to slave.
