Just got off the phone to a friend of mine who runs a recording studio. He's trying to upgrade his studio computer to a dual processor jobbie and it's now having a fit. Wouldn't be a problem but he's got the Prince's Trust coming over to have a chat with him about funding and he'd ideally like to show his set-up running without a hitch. If anyone can help diagnose the problem it would be much appreciated (afraid I'm a bit of luddite so any questions you might have in reply I'd have to direct to him).

 

Here's the thing:

 

He's just put in an E6400 Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2Gb of DDR RAM on a ASROCK Conroe 945G-DVI motherboard.

 

He's dual booting it, running two hard drives off the IDE cable. It can see a copy of Windows on both drives but when you select one (via any route, "safe mode" etc, etc) it goes back to the start (and continues to go round in a loop everytime you try).

 

Any suggestion chaps? The poor guy is tearing is hair out :(

 

Cheers.

When you say dual boot are you refering to 2 separate operating systems? If so, he can't use both OS at the same time. Can't he disconnect the hard disk with the OS that he won't be using, then boot up normally.

 

This will not permanently resolve the issue, but it will make his PC work for the duration of his visit. Then he can look to get a proper fix for it.

 

HTH

he will have to connect it with one stick of ram at a time to see if thats the problem. then try a different harddrive. is he running xp or vista or both. vista has had some huge problems with the boot loader.

 

if all else fails he will have to put his old hardware bac kin for the princes trust

What was the setup before the upgrade?

 

i'd get a fresh hard drive & re-install windows for the new setup.

 

J

Cheers guys. :) Just waiting for him to call me back then I'll relay the info. Just spoke to someone else and they also suggested checking the jumpers that govern which is master and which is slave are set up correctly.

There could be lots of things that cause this. He could try clearing and resetting the BIOS back to safe defaults. If he added different memory this could cause the problem as it could corrup the boot.ini file.

 

Check the memory is ok- download a memory test that boots of a floppy disk

 

Check the video card as well as this could cause problems.

 

If he has the windows CD then boot this cd and run R for repair and run chkdsk /R at the prompt.

 

Not much help .. but that is where I would start.

worst case scenario is having to install the os again. just put the 2drives in another pc as a slave and copy the important data to the host pc's drive. then put them back in to the problem pc and format them both and install your os'. now connect to the host pc via a network and copy the important data back.

 

plus point there is you will also get rid of accumlated crap unless you have a decent clear up routine.

Right, passed on all the info and he's trying a few things out now...fingers crossed. Thanks again for the input guys :)

I take it your mate changed the motherboard along with the processor? To me it sounds like a classic case of XP trying to wake up in a new body. I've found that transplanting an XP OS isn't like earlier versions of windows where you could just stick another hard drive in another computer and it would boot fine.

 

I have the same problem with a computer I have that just died, when I put the harddrive in another computer to check its ok, it just goes round in circles attempting to boot.