Alright, so it was maybe a year ago that I was having trouble with my desktop, which is getting a little old. I put it together around 2005, and it worked well til the power supply crapped out and killed the video card. Replaced both of those, and still had a few problems. Scrolling on websites became jerky. I'd get a weird jumbled pixel screen as the desktop was loading when I first turned on the computer. Other than that, it's been too long for me to remember the other issues I was having.

So I decided it was time to at least try a format and reinstall of Windows. I had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 (provided by the university) and installed it. At some point fairly close to completion, it stalled (longer than 24 hours). I knew it was a bad thing, but I went ahead and powered off the computer. I decided to go back to XP, the last working operating system, of which I also owned a legit copy. Only problem is that when I reformat and reset the BIOS, I'm still getting a Windows 7 installation screen when I boot to the Windows XP disc.

Can anyone provide me with any suggestion of how to get past this? I've never run into this sort of issue before and I don't really know how I can resolve it to just get the old XP back.

10/8/2013 1:19:38 AM

Burn a Linux LiveCD, then pop it in and make sure you got all the partitions; Windows 7 setup creates a sort of system-recovery partition without a label, and its intended use is for when you have a hard time getting your Win7 system to boot (it's like Recovery Console on steroids).

10/8/2013 2:45:56 AM

Or grab and burn a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) and go for the simplest drive wipe. You don't even need to wipe the whole disk - really all you need is to blast the first 512 bytes, and then it's effectively a blank disk for your purposes.

[Edited on October 8, 2013 at 8:06 AM. Reason : ]

10/8/2013 8:06:07 AM

Bloody hell, didn't realize I still had the Win7 disc in my other disc drive. Been too long since I bothered with the computer.



[Edited on October 8, 2013 at 9:49 AM. Reason : .]

10/8/2013 9:39:08 AM

So I completely wiped everything, and when I go to boot from the cd, it just freezes at the "boot from cd" stage. Any recommendations?

10/8/2013 4:14:21 PM

you wiped everything?

then install Windows

10/8/2013 5:51:59 PM

get a new hard drive

10/8/2013 7:02:23 PM

Still finicky with installing from the wiped drive. Used DNAB on the old master HDD, formatted NTFS, then it told me the drive might be bad.

Now using the old slave as the master. Unfortunately, DNAB takes like 4 hours to wipe the whole drive. That's done, now it's just taking forever to format the second drive for NTFS. I don't particularly know why both of the old drives were FAT32, might have been some part of the fuckup when I was trying to get the new operating system on a year ago.

Also turns out that, despite being nearly immaculate, the old XP install disc must have gone bad in some way. Downloaded a new disc image that seems to be working, just isn't liking the old FAT32 format. Everything takes too damn long. Will hopefully return with good news in the morning.

10/9/2013 12:31:54 AM

For whatever reason, Windows XP will nearly finish installing, then crash. Tried the same with Windows 7, got pretty much the same results. Somehow, I dug up my aged disc for Windows 2000, which installs. Tried installing XP after I got 2k running, got pretty far along in the install til it blue screened. ATI2DVAG error. Is this a hint the video card is done, or is there a way to somehow get the video card drivers dealt with during an OS install/swap?

10/9/2013 11:07:57 AM

First, it's DBAN, not DNAB

Anyway, you should have just needed to delete partitions, not wipe the disk so the FBI couldn't read what was on it; that's why it took so long.

Also, your video card might have seen better days

10/9/2013 12:21:04 PM

Well damn. If so, that sucks...makes it the 2nd video card that has gone bad in there. I guess if there's a positive, the whole setup is so old, if I replace it with something on par, it'll probably be relatively cheap (if I can find it).

10/9/2013 1:06:57 PM

Just blast the first part of the disk - Make DBAN do a simple zero (not one of the complex RNG algorithm) and run it for ~1 minute. Don't worry about formatting it. When you go to install W7, it should show up as an uninitialized drive, which it will partition and format for you.

10/9/2013 1:28:57 PM

Yeah, at this point you can pretty much guarantee that you have at least one hardware issue. I think its time to retire the machine. If your power supply bit the dust along the way, it likely not only took out the video card, but also surged the motherboard and other peripherals (other cards, hard drives, memory and cpu).

The last time I had a PSU go south, the machine wasn't right until I had replaced the video, motherboard, ram and hard drives.

[Edited on October 9, 2013 at 1:38 PM. Reason : .]

10/9/2013 1:38:07 PM

MAIN SCREEN TURN ON

Quote :

"WHAT YOU SAY!!!"

10/9/2013 2:35:36 PM

Shit. Got XP installed by first getting Win2000 installed, then doing the upgrade. Unfortunately, pretty much nothing these days is compatible with XP without any of the service packs installed. Service pack 1a is some joke to Microsoft, as it won't connect to the server to download the updates. Install SP2, gets all the way through til that last restart to finish, when the ati2dvag infinite loop comes back up. Supposedly a fairly common problem, could be hardware or drivers. How the hell do I change the driver when 1) I can't get into windows and 2) ATI's [AMD's] support website is down for now?

10/9/2013 3:57:32 PM

Alright, I think I beat it. Fortunately, I kept my old video card around, which was the same radeon 9800 pro as what was giving me the error. Looking online, the ati2dvag infinite loop error is somewhat common and has fixes. So I hooked up the old video card, which didn't get the error, and I was able to install XP with all the necessary service packs. Once that was installed, I did one of the fixes I found online (http://www.sightsea.com/pghpchd/pages/infinite_loop.html). Turned off the computer, swapped out the cards to the one with the infinite loop bluescreen, turned it back on, crossed fingers.

BAM! I appreciate the help, duders. I just hope there's not some hidden problem that will bring this machine back down. For now, I'm happy. If I can get Halflife 2 back up and running on this thing, I'll consider it fixed.

[Edited on October 10, 2013 at 2:27 AM. Reason : all your base]

10/10/2013 2:25:51 AM

that'll teach you to buy Radeon cards

10/10/2013 6:02:21 PM

that'll taught me 8 or 9 years ago.

10/10/2013 7:21:05 PM

Since it's vaguely on topic, does anyone know your best option for installing Windows 7 on a new HDD after your LD one failed, and you have the OS product key but no Win 7 disk?

10/11/2013 12:57:07 PM