Need serious XP help

[UltraJounin]

Ok 3 weeks ago I purchased a shuttle sn95g5 with 1gb of corsair pc3200, 1.8ghz amd64 socket 939, 300gb maxtor SATA 16mb cache. I was using my old nvidia 5700LE. My initial install was flawless win XP Pro with SP2 (legit copy) OEM. Basically until yesterday everything worked perfectly. NOthing is OC'd by the way

I purchased a Evga 6800GT 256mb card and installed it all was perfect. I tested all my games, UT2k4, HL2, and Doom3. I played a few hours, ran my regular programs, surfed the net - no problems at all. I leave the house and come home and I have a BSOD. First one was "page fault in non paged area" then a bunch of random ones. I could boot into safe mode and found that my antvirus program (avast) caused some serious issues. Then it seemed that I had the Sasser on my pc-i got an lsass.exe error and my pc rebooted-. I ran a Vscan, and a sasser removal but it didnt find anything.

I ran a chkdsk and it didnt find any errors. I ran an XP repair (recovery console) but some files failed to copy over, this is where the major issues started. Somehow I was able to boot back into windows (dont ask it randomly started by itself) and I was able to save my data. I went ahead and tried a fresh install but now I am constantly getting "the file setup placed on your hard drive is not valid.." when XP tries to copy system files. It does it randomly on various different files telling me that i need to make sure that the XP cd is in the drive. My disk is NOT damaged and I've tried different optical drives but still get the same error. I decided to test out another hard drive, this time a maxtor PATA 80gb and got the same errors. I've taken the 6800gt and replaced it with my old 5700LE but no luck

I have NO idea what the issue is at this point. I'm generally a great troubleshooter but im stuck on this one. I'm thinking that somehow its related to the motherboard but there arent any lightbubls going off in my head.

Has anybody run into XP not installing and what was you solution... PLEASE HELP!!!

[jbog91]

Ok, I don't know much about this and I am just shooting a guess but try using making a bootable rescue cd and let it help you install.

http://911cd.net/911cd/ This is one I know of that will help you install it as well as many other things.

[UltraJounin]

Ok, I don't know much about this and I am just shooting a guess but try using making a bootable rescue cd and let it help you install.

http://911cd.net/911cd/ This is one I know of that will help you install it as well as many other things.

Update: I changed my memory and was able to load XP setup but now after the files are copied and the PC reboots it doesnt recognize my hard drive anymore - should I be getting the SATA drivers from maxtor at this point?

[MajorDomo]

When you load the OS, it will come to a point where it asks for third party drivers....you have to monitor the installation and install the drivers at that point.

[Phaedrus]

First.... lsass (http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/lsass/) is a legit service. Although it can be the name of a virus, you might just be seeing an actual error in the legit service
Second, if you started switching harddrives the MBR may need to be re-written... Boot to recovery console (with the HD installed that you are going to use) and do a fixmbr (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/bootcons_fixmbr.asp).

see if that will get your old install recognized.

[UltraJounin]

First.... lsass (http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/lsass/) is a legit service. Although it can be the name of a virus, you might just be seeing an actual error in the legit service
Second, if you started switching harddrives the MBR may need to be re-written... Boot to recovery console (with the HD installed that you are going to use) and do a fixmbr (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/bootcons_fixmbr.asp).

see if that will get your old install recognized.

Right, I understand that but the error I got was the exact same one I used to see when we got shutdown by sasser over the summer (IRS in Washington). At this point repairing the MBR is somewhat invalid because my harddrive is no longer recognized. I'm stuck with my hands up here, I've decided to run memtest86 to at least try and narrow down my problem but from what I know the 'page fault in non paged area' is an issue when two drivers/resources try to use the same area of memory. If its not my memory then I'd hate to guess that it may be my processor putting out bad data, or even worse the mobo/case...sigh.

[Oldie]

Well to eliminate all possibility of problems, go ahead and download maxblast, and just write 0's to the drive. Quick fill should probably do it, but if you want to do the full write, I'd let it start in the morning and check back after several hours. Then make sure you have the sata drivers for your mainboard/controller and try reinstalling windows. If you still get file copy errors, it's likely memory issues.
http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_115159 (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?u=115159)

[UltraJounin]

Umm...OK

I ran the memtest on both sticks seperately in slot1. Both passed 3 tests. I then decided to try both sticks at once and what happens... ALLLLL ERRORS! I take it this means my issue is with the slot on my mobo and should now be worried about getting my mobo replaced as opposed to the memory? Sigh....


2/14/2005 12:40am
Final Update: It definitely the MOBO, I'm back on my PC only running 512mb of ram, but everything is working fine. Im going to RMA this mobo and get a new one from shuttle...sigh