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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: vun on Thu, 15 March 2012, 11:24:51
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I upgraded my desktop rig today with new mobo, CPU, RAM and video card but it won't boot to Windows.
What happens is it goes to the "starting windows" screen for a bit and then just flashes a really quick bluescreen and reboots.
New hardware is :
ASUS Sabertooth P67 mobo
Corsair Vengeance 8GB(2x4) RAM
Zotac GeForce 570
Intel i7 3,4GHz
Since this is the first time I've done a major upgrade I have no clue as to what's wrong, but I'm guessing I managed to break either the RAM or the CPU when installing somehow. Or maybe I botched up the wiring on the mobo. Might be that the hardware was faulty when I got it, but even so I need help knowing which part to RMA.
Any help would be appreciated, I don't want to have to buy new CPU or mobo. If the RAM is busted then phew because that's the cheapest part to replace.
CPU would be OK because it's easier to replace than the mobo.
Just let me know if you need more info and/or pictures of the wiring or something.
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Missing drivers? Can you boot from UBCD and install the drivers that came with the motherboard and video card?
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What exactly is the starting windows screen?
I may be wrong, but if you are able to boot it shouldn't be due to a broken hardware.
Check that your power supply is strong enough for your current setup, that your HDD works and is correctly wired, just to be sure.
But my guess is it's a software matter. Maybe some missing pilots of your new motherboard. Try to put the windows CD and repair/reinstall.
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Power supply is 750W so should be enough.
I've been trying to boot to safe mode for a while now but the F8 key brings me to the EFI BIOS utility and when I put my Windows CD in I can't find it in the boot list.
Manual says something about installing boot device to system to be able to use the F8 menu but i have no clue what "install boot device to system" means.
Going to see if there was a CD that came with the mobo I can boot from now.
EDIT:
Actually I don't think my DVD drive is connected; I couldn't find anywhere to plug the super wide cable on the mobo and I think that might be the cable for the DVD drive.
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Yeah, the wide cable is for the hard drives and the DVD*drives.
Each of them has to be connected to the power supply and the main board.
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Problem is I can't find anywhere to connect the wide cable, a PATA cable or something like that according to Wikipedia, on the mobo. I guess this means I have to get a new DVD drive.
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.
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Thanks, lots of useful info here.
So basically what you're saying is I have to put the old mobo back in?
I'd rather not as it was quite a lot of work, although if that's my only option it's doable.
I have a CD with Ubuntu on it which I can run from the CD, is that any help? Well I probably will either way if only to make sure I get a backup of important files.
Also, can I pre-load the drivers for the new setup if I connect my HDD to my laptop via e-sata?
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Well I was going to re-install Windows anyways, this is a good excuse to do it. So basically if I put an image of my windows CD on a USB stick and reinstall everything will be OK?
Also, why can't I preload the drivers from my laptop if I can do it on my old setup? I can't see the difference.
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no.
False. it's just not really worth the time when you could have a nice fresh windows install.
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and how are you going to get windows to install and register the drivers without it running? I've not found a successful way of doing so. yes, you can copy them over, but no way of installing them without being able to boot the OS that i'm aware of.
Remote Registry.
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.
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be sure to send that link my way... i'd like to shake hands with anyone who's successfully installed and registered storage controller drivers on a non-active OS.
--edit--
again, i'm sure it's possible... but here's the thing.
1) remote registry assumes the box is up and running. it's not. you'd need to use an offline registry editor, but...
2) the amount of effort required to get it to work successfully would be HUGE, and you'd need to be so intimately familiar with both the hardware and driver, that it's unlikely you'd have ended up in the situation of needing to do it in the first place.
-hardware IDs
-driver,hardware, and bus guids
-device object IDs
-hardware location path on the PCI controller
and that's just scratching the surface.
I literally JUST did it today at work, but I already had a .reg file so poo poo.
I don't disagree that it's a pain in the ass. Reinstall is normally the best way to go. Didn't mean to derail so much here.
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re: "misleading" and "red herrings", was trying to provide the guy with a bit of dumbed-down basic knowledge on what he's up against, or at least give him a few things to google to broaden his horizons.Could if he's doing something insane like going from an old uniprocessor HAL to modern multiprocessor.../me extends hand towards Surrey from Vancouver. I kind of cheated I suppose, in that I installed another instance of the OS on another hard drive (by injecting the controller driver into the install cd...), so I had a good working example of how things should look. Fired up regedit, poked around, found 3 or 4 keys that had to be thrown into the system registry hive on the target install, export, bit of tweaking to the .reg file, import into target system hive...How does that work if the target system isn't standing on its own two feet?
You boot the system from a live PE CD that has Remote Registry on it. Sounds like OP has some optical drive woes as well though :/
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So let me get this straight, you swapped your motherboard and used the same old hard drive without re-installing Windows? That's not going to make Windows happy... I assume you're running Windows 7?
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98% of this thread is e-peen waging..... This is the only relevant section.our username
Back up your data on a thumbdrive.... Family photo's, video's.Goat Sex, Anime' porn, your girlfriend's tits .....all important items under C:\documents and settings(\users in Win7)\johndoe(insert your username)
Then re-install windows. I haven't seen successful motherboard replacements without reload since Norton Ghost2000. There are ways around it with things like Acronis Universal restore .......
But like was said above.... It's just not worth it.
For future reference , this is why I always keep my OS separated from my data either through partitioning or through separate drives so I can reload without concern of losing my midget pr0n.....
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So let me get this straight, you swapped your motherboard and used the same old hard drive without re-installing Windows? That's not going to make Windows happy... I assume you're running Windows 7?
Only Relevant section ^^^
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98% of this thread is e-peen waging..... This is the only relevant section.our username
Back up your data on a thumbdrive.... Family photo's, video's.Goat Sex, Anime' porn, your girlfriend's tits .....all important items under C:\documents and settings(\users in Win7)\johndoe(insert your username)
Then re-install windows. I haven't seen successful motherboard replacements without reload since Norton Ghost2000. There are ways around it with things like Acronis Universal restore .......
But like was said above.... It's just not worth it.
For future reference , this is why I always keep my OS separated from my data either through partitioning or through separate drives so I can reload without concern of losing my midget pr0n.....
Thank you. Most of my data is separate from my OS, though I didn't learn how to keep the documents folder etc. off the OS drive until yesterday so still lots of stuff on there.
I'll see if I can connect all my HDDs to my laptop today as I have 2 external HDDs I can put the files I want on.
As for the optical drive; a replacement is on the way.
Edit:
As I'd rather not fiddle around inside the computer more I figured I'd just run Ubuntu off a USB stick and copy all the files I want over the external HDDs, but after a minute or so it stops recognising mouse clicks.
Right now I'm looking for a way to run either another Linux distro or windows from a USB stick. I found PE builder so I'll try that first as I have a few XP CDs around.
Here's hoping it works.
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Don't bother with PE builder... gimme a sec...
edit: Okey, the tool I found super quick and easy (and multiply useful since I can now install Windows, do BIOS updates, run Parted Magic, and ..., ...) YUMI (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/) is a great tool to create bootable USB drives with whatever you want on them. Gives you a boot menu to pick from however many things you stick on your drive.
edit2: Oh yeah, Parted Magic is a great choice for rescue disks since it has a full linux gui environment and NTFS support.
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Don't bother with PE builder... gimme a sec...
edit: Okey, the tool I found super quick and easy (and multiply useful since I can now install Windows, do BIOS updates, run Parted Magic, and ..., ...) YUMI (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/) is a great tool to create bootable USB drives with whatever you want on them. Gives you a boot menu to pick from however many things you stick on your drive.
edit2: Oh yeah, Parted Magic is a great choice for rescue disks since it has a full linux gui environment and NTFS support.
Thank you, this is really helpful because I couldn't make much sense of neither PE builder nor the guide I found for it.
I tried using a pendrivelinux program to create a USB stick with a bootable Ubunutu on it, but as I said earlier it stopped registering mouse clicks after a short while. Mostly. Once it would register mouse clicks within the current window, another time it would only register clicks on the the four workspace squares in the corner. And the most recent version of Ubuntu wouldn't boot at all.
EDIT:
PartedMagic won't boot either it seems; during boot a few lines about setting latency timers to 64 shows up and it stops there. I made a bootable USB with the UNetbootin program, maybe I should try doing it with another OS instead of PartedMagic.
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YUMI seems to be a nice find, I didn't know about it! There's one that can be used within linux as well:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/multiboot-create-a-multiboot-usb-from-linux/
No more separate usb sticks for each .iso image, cool!
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I gave up on trying to salvage the files via USB Linux and just put the HDD in a dock and connected it to my laptop. Would probably be better if I'd done that in the first place.Installing Windows again via USB now while I wait for my new optical drive to get here.Thanks to all of you for helping, otherwise I'd probably still be failing and worrying that it might be a hardware failure.And I learned a lot in the process, hopefully enough to build my own rig from scratch next time as the one I have now was pre-built.
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be sure to send that link my way... i'd like to shake hands with anyone who's successfully installed and registered storage controller drivers on a non-active OS.
--edit--
again, i'm sure it's possible... but here's the thing.
1) remote registry assumes the box is up and running. it's not. you'd need to use an offline registry editor, but...
2) the amount of effort required to get it to work successfully would be HUGE, and you'd need to be so intimately familiar with both the hardware and driver, that it's unlikely you'd have ended up in the situation of needing to do it in the first place.
-hardware IDs
-driver,hardware, and bus guids
-device object IDs
-hardware location path on the PCI controller
and that's just scratching the surface.
I live in Las Vegas, feel free to come and visit just to shake my hand. Best way to install storage drivers on a non bootable OS is with Acronis using Universal Restore. It is an imaging program like Ghost, but it allows you to insert drivers into the image. It also doesn't make you use some offline registry editor, or any other non intuitive windows PE tools, it has a wizard that just asks you for the storage driver. You can also change the HAL and all kinds of other neat stuff. As far as imaging programs go it is very pricey, but in my opinion it is the best product on the market. I have literally imaged thousands of machines using master images across all sorts of different hardware, which is pretty common practice in corporate IT environments. Anyway I hope that helps at least a little.
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Well I was going to re-install Windows anyways, this is a good excuse to do it. So basically if I put an image of my windows CD on a USB stick and reinstall everything will be OK?
Also, why can't I preload the drivers from my laptop if I can do it on my old setup? I can't see the difference.
Can you afford a new HDD? You could always do a fresh Windows install with the new HDD on the new system, and then use your old drive, with old windows on it, as secondary storage. And delete old windows once everything is working.
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that's interesting... i've been using (and i'm a HUGE fan) of Acronis for years. I've never looked at the universal restore software before, but their Disk Director (and specifically the server version) freaking rocks, and when partition magic faded into the night, I was really pleased to have discovered it.
Acronis really is the best. Unfortunately, they are really expensive if you want to be properly licensed, unless you use illegal versions, and in that case, have fun with the trojans. Also, unless you are a corporate customer with six or seven figure budgets, you don't get American support, which is a real bummer.