Nightsoul

Well, I'm writing this from my own comp, from Win2k, so as you can probably gather from that it now works. Tweaking the BIOS seemed to do the trick. Thanks for your help!

Thanks Sampson, I'll try that. I unplugged all unnecessary stuff: floppy drive, DVD drive, network card, sound card, second HD... no luck. So I'm running out of stuff to try, all I can do now is tweak in the BIOS.

Both clean install and installing on top of Win98 give the same result: halt on the hardware check when booting from HD the first time. I'll try ripping more stuff off to try to get it to work, removing only network card and sound card didn't help, so I suppose at least those aren't the problem.

Well, at least I'm not blaming it before considering other things. I've had more than my share of problems with motherboards using VIA's KT133 chip, and when I was told it might cause it, it came to me as no big surprise. Well anyway, even if this is not the cause of the error, something surely is. And I don't know about the power supply thing, how come Win2k would take any more toll on it than Win98 or Linux? Both 98 and Linux work on the system (well if you can ever say that Win98 'works', that's why I'm changing to Win2k). Well anyhow, here are my system specs: AMD Thunderbird 750MHz MSI K7T Pro2 motherboard ASUS V7100 Pro GeForce2 MX400 3D-card Creative SoundBlaster PCI128 3Com 3C900 Vortex/Boomerang Combo LAN card Maxtor 30GB HD Seagate 20GB HD Plextor PlexWriter 40x24x10 Samsung DVD drive 512MB SDRAM BIOS settings are only slightly changed from the default. As CyberGenX said I might to have to try to pull out the network card and soundcard etc 'unnecessary' stuff and see if that helps.

I have a VIA KT133-based MSI Pro2 motherboard. When installing Windows 2000, it copies the stuff to the hard drive, but when it boots from the hard drive for the first time and starts checking what devices the system has in it - when it's in the middle of the 'check bar', the diskette drive makes somes sounds, the screen blinks a few times.. and them comes a blue error message saying 'Hardware malfunction', 'Please contact your hardware vendor', and 'System halted'. I can't find a way to avert this - is this issue due to the KT133 chip, my uncle advised me that it might be to blame? Any help is greatly appreciated.