Trouble with Windows XP

[ziddey]

I'm not sure if this was coincidence or not, but here's the run of events:

For some reason, the widcomm bluetooth modem wasn't functioning properly, and the driver wouldn't install. I manually fed it drivers, but it still wasn't working properly. Then, I noticed a stray "standard modem", so I uninstalled it.

After I rebooted again, I got Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error}. Safe mode / last known good didn't work.

I popped in a bunch of xp cd's, but all of them die with error code 7 ntkrnlmp.exe.

The laptop has a pentium m dothan. Reading about the code 7, I tried f7 to manually specify, but it doesn't help.

One thing about the laptop is that the heatpipe for the graphics chip broke somehow, so I have to keep the gpu in low power mode to prevent severe overheating.

Still, there can be a lot of heat buildup in the general area. I'm hoping that it's not something that overheated and no longer functions.

Once I get my screwdriver back, I'll try pulling out the hard drive / ram and see if anything changes the situation. I've reset the bios to no avail.


Anyone ever heard about this before?

[ziddey]

Update: tested ram with memtest. no issues. tried pulling hard drive and booting xp install in case it was reading existing acpi settings with no help. any ideas why xp cd won't even proceed

[Azhar]

NTKRNLMP.EXE is a Windows kernel with multiprocessor drivers. If your processor is a dual-core (or quad core), Windows will try to load the MP driver prior to installing.

You can bypass that by forcing single processor installation by pressing F7 when you see the screen "Press F6 to load SCSI driver" at the beginning of the installation.

Later after you load into Windows XP, you can install the multiprocessor driver yourself.

This is undocumented by Microsoft.

[Azhar]

One other FYI - another undocumented selection during that time is F5, where installation lets you chose which Hardware Abstraction Layer and Kernel to deploy during installation.

[ziddey]

I've tried both the f5 and f7 trick already. Still, it gives me problems with the mp kernel. My cpu is single core.