Heeeelp! Installation of Windows XP in PIII 866 Platform

[esb_1955 0]

This might be a primitive question but since PC here in our country is expensive I can only afford PIII 866 PC Compatible. Here is the complete specs:

- PIII 866 Mhz

- Asus MB cuv4x-c (I don't know the chipset)

- Geforce 2 MX400 64MB AGP

- 128MB x 2 (256) SDRAM DIMM

- Creative sound card

- D-Link Fast 10/100 Ethernet Card

- Windows 2000 Pro edition service pack 4

 

This is my problem, I was upgrading my OS from 2k to XP and at the start seems all ok. I choose the new OS to be a clean installation so it erased my old files which I happende to have backed-up. It went smoothly until it reached the stage before the "final installation" and it has loaded almost 82% when it suddenly shutdown the PC. It says:

Shutdown Fatal Hardware Error

Disable Caching and shadowing

If this is the first time this

warning occured, pls restart and

re-install.

If still this warning occurs please call

or contact the manufacturer.

 

I even tried this for the nth time still the same problem. So what I did was to reinstall my 2k OS and it worked smoothly without problems. I happened to have bought a second hand Dell OPTIMA with the same specs except for the mother board which is Intel _ _ _ _. It has no OS so I installed right away the XP, to my surprice it worked in one installation.

 

CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE GIVE AN ANSWER PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!!!!!!

 

Thank you and regards,

Ed

[Sampson 0]

In general, when XP will not install correctly, it is because the hardware is not correctly recognized and the drivers selected for it fail.

 

There are some motherboards that I have seen that have failed to install XP mainly because onboard "peripherals" were not recognized properly. But, for the most part, it is sound boards and video cards that are the culprits. In your case it could be the sound board. You call it an sb board, but it may be a board that emulates soundblaster. On the other hand, since it is a PIII board, the AGP slot may not be AGP 2.0 or higher and is a subset of 2X off of AGP 1.0. The MX400 is still able to use this spec while a newer card requiring AGP 2.0 will cause your machine to go south.

 

If you are determined to make XP run on that machine, I would investigate which of those two possibilities is the problem. Find out if the sound card is really a soundblaster. If it isn't, it might be your problem. Since there is nothing that you can do about the AGP, (your motherboard book will tell you the AGP spec), you could install a PCI card like the FX5200 and not run AGP slot at all. Either way, this will cost you some time and money. Or, you can stay with W2K, which is really a good operating system anyway.