I just upgraded from a soyo dragon kt400 to an epox 8hda3+ kt800.

I did not reformat.

I simply put everything in, put my hardrive on a raid channel as an ide device (not running raid), started up, and no matter what, safe mode or normal, it crashes at the end of the windows xp loading screen.

do I have to reformat? I planned to reformat soon anyways, but I didnt want to yet. I have stuff in "my documents" and other folders on C that I MUST move. I also just wanted to wait to reformat on the weekend, just basically another day.

What can I do? What the heck is going on?

I'm running windows xp with service pack 2 RC1 from the microsoft beta site. I wanted to burn the slipstream copy i have on my drive adn reformat with that.

Can I just install windows xp pro overtop of the version I have now or will it destroy everything in mydocuments and on the desktop?

First backup.

Then you can try repairing the installation. Boot form the winXP CD and choose the repair installation option (not the recovery console)

It is advisable to have the same service pack version CD.

I have managed to do this with sp1 without much of a problem, but others have not made such a positive experience, so be careful and backup.

fixed it.

How did you fix it?

I put my hardrive on an ide channel rather than one of the sata channels. In there I was able to get into windows so I installed my motherboard drivers and sata and raid drivers.

then everything worked.

we're having the same problem...windows won't boot up with the new motherboard we installed. the board is a SOYO SY-K7VME. windows can't get passed networking. been playing with this stupid thing for over a week now...we even cleared a hard drive to see if that was the problem. now it can't read that hard drive either. any suggestions?

Try a new motherboard, perhaps?

I tried to replace my MB because my old one went tits up. I read that I could set to bios to boot to the cdrom and WINXP would redetect the MB and all that.
I exited the BIOS and rebooted.

It didnt boot to the CDrom WINXP cd. It tried to boot to the OS on the HD. I got a vague WINXP error. I tried to boot to floppy and when it checks the boot record and says ok then it just sits there doing nothing.
I cant format, i cant fdisk I cant do anything.

Any advice?

Originally posted by CdrCargil:


How many CD-ROM devices do you have, some motherboards (like mine) does not boot up from any CD-ROM if you select it to boot from CD first, you have to specify which CD-ROM to boot from.
If you managed with that it should show you a message when booting up that says "Press any key to boot from CD" and then it has these dots counting down .............
Press any key and it will boot from the CD.