Windows 2000 wont boot

[jgermin999]

I have performed a fresh install of Windows 2000 desktop, and the computer hangs at the flash screen. The hard disk and CDROM lights stay lit.

I can boot windows 2000 into safe mode only, I have never been able to boot to windows 2000 normally except during the setup and installation.

In the event manager, I get the following errors (I dont know if these are related to safe mode or normal windows 2000 load failure)

The server did not register with DCOM in the required timeout - Event ID 10010
I also get service controller errors - Event ID 7001, 7026.

I have reinstalled windows 2000 3x and never resolves the issue, I suspect motherboard, but need to rule out OS issue.

 

[wolluf]

I'd look at ruling out ALL hardware issues first (swap out memory (if you have > 1 stick, try each on its own - if just one, get another from elsewhere)/graphics card. Remove any modem, network, sound cards. Remove any CD writers, zip drives). This is start point - if get to ok point, add things back one at a time to establish culprit.

 

[QldSugardaddy]

This may sound far fetched, but believe it or not I had this problem on 2 machines in 2 days and nearly pensioned them out as spare parts. by accident I did the following and it worked. I wont sound very technical here, but hopefully u get the gist. On the back of the hdd where you can make is master or slave drive, or there is another setting which escapes my memory. There is a plastic sleeve which u can move over depending on how you wish to set up the drive.
Try is on all three, as I cant remember, but i think it was the one that wasnt master or slave. This worked for me - surprisingly. I was chuffed When in doubt, kick 'er in the guts

 

[jgermin999]

Thanks for your suggestions, I spend the entire day yesterday troubleshooting this. And narrowed it down to 2 motherboards, both are ATREND based on the BX chipset. Both are about 2 years old.

I have tried 3 different hard drives, all with Windows 2000 on them, 2 different video cards, power supplies, all pci cards removed, 2 different cdroms, a combination of 6 different memory sticks.

On both of these ATrend motherboards, when windows comes up it always locks the cdrom & harddrive light before windows ever loads. However, windows will boot in safe mode only. This is on 3 independant windows 2000 hard drives and on 2 fresh installs to 2 drives.

One of the motherboards started doing this to me 1 year ago, so I decommissioned it, but when this 2nd one started acting out I brought out the older one to compare the issue. They both do the same thing?

But unless, you guys know of something else to try. I am going to just replace the motherboards and cpu's with newer ones. One of the computers was a 933mhz PIII, the other was a 500mhz PIII.

 

[wolluf]

I'd go with the replacement!

 

[jgermin999]

Guess what, I replaced the motherboard and cpu with an ECS K7S5A pro, with an Athlon XP 1800.
Now the drives still wont boot, but I do get an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE with a blue screen of death, when windows tries to boot. Instead of getting a lockup and/or blank screen?

All 3 drives have same problem?

Possible boot sector corruption on all 3 drives by virus?
MAN this is not lucky, I have Norton Antivirus 2003 running 24x7 with weekly scans.

This should not have happened.

 

[QldSugardaddy]

did u try my idea? i reckon u might have abit of luck, coz i was in the exact same boat as u When in doubt, kick 'er in the guts

 

[ifix1]

did you update drivers?if you didn't even get it to boot after installing os, try installing drivers in safe mode..

 

[jgermin999]

Here's an update for you all.

I have tried changing the hard drive jumpers to CHS mode, from MASTER/SLAVE combination without success.

I found another post on this website, who had similar problems and they recommended downloading MEMTEST86 and ruling out memory.

Well, I downloaded MEMTEST and ran it, I only had 1 512mb stick and 1 128mb stick of SDRAM in the system, and it did find memory errors.

I have 7 sticks of ram total, to test out (1 512, 4 128, 2 64 meg sticks).

I also learned that ATHLON XP's are very demanding, and you need quality RAM for them, or they will cause problems. The RAM I have is not a major brand, like KINGSTON or CRUCIAL, but the odd thing is. If it turns out that the RAM is bad for the new XP cpu, but turns out to be good for the older boards.

I will go back and do the ram test on the older boards. I have swapped out every single stick and only had 1 stick running at a time on both boards and still had the problem.

I think the New motherboard problem is unrelated to the old motherboard problems.

I have used Western Digital's LIFEGUARD, MAXTOR's MAXBLAST and scanned the drives, no errors were detected on any of the drives.

After the ram test, I am going to install new BOOT headers in the drives, and see if I can get it to work.

PS. Thanks for all your suggestions.