Trouble upgrading to XP Pro from Win2K Pro

Digerati: I apologize for confusing you–I mentioned the Roxio in my first post. When I tried to upgrade the system initially (copied from the post): " The install seemed to go OK until the final reboot, when the system hung up while the settings were being loaded. The mouse and keyboard (both wireless) froze and wouldn't work, and my ethernet card want dead and wouldn't indicate that it was functioning, either at the machine or at the server. While booting up, both appear to be functioning normally. I COULD get the machine to run in Safe Mode, and rechecked the read me file on the XP upgrade disk, and found that I'd left the antivirus on. I went and actually removed the antivirus, reloaded XP, and appeared to get the thing to work (although the server connection was still ont working), but then rebooted the machine to remove some software (Roxio CD Creator 6) that the system told me would have to be removed and reloaded in order to function properly on XP." Now I'll fill in the blanks there. When the machine made it to the desktop screen (for the only time, sadly), I got a message to remove and reinstall Roxio so it would work properly. I went to the Control Panel, selected Add/Remove Programs, and selected Roxio for removal. The Uninstall wizard did its thing, and then started to reboot the system. It never came up again after that. When I get home tonight, I'll go through and get all the drivers needed all on one CD, (I think I actually have most of them already), and SP3 (the upgrade disk already has SP2). I'll then discinnect the Ethernet cable and try things again. The AV, etc. are going to be brand-new anyway, so once I resume connection to the Internet, I'll have her go there and take care of it immediately. I do have an additional question: The system always comes up in Safe Mode. Is this a good sign, or am I just fooling myself that it is? Thanks fopr all the help and suggestions–TvH

Greetings all Coming up in Safe mode is a good thing, generally points that you are having "Driver problems" if it will not come up normally. Remember I said "Generally". You get suspicious if it faults at the same place each time meaning perhaps a specific memory address is being asked for and cant do it, Bad memory and only bad at a particular address. Put that one in the realm of possibilities but chase down driver issues as the most likely. If this were my machine, I would try a ps2 mouse and keyboard to eliminate Mice/Keyboard being the culprit. Take out any USB devices if they are plugged in as well. Especially that wireless mouse/keyboard dongle. I am almost certain you are choking on a Advanced setting that is wanting to be set or a auto loading program when you are trying to come up in Nomal mode. Windows XP safe mode provides you with a basic graphics driver (enough to display the user interface), access to your drives and windows configuration, and very little else. This why it is working. After trying to boot with a ps2 key and mouse and you get no success, go into safemode and access msconfig. go to 'start\run' and type 'msconfig' to open the program. Select the 'startup' tab. Any of the checked items are software that will run on startup. To start troubleshooting, uncheck most or all of the items, exit MSCONFIG and reboot your system in normal mode. Success? Then go back and add them one by one to see if you can identify the culprit. success? You can check to see if video is being a problem by using the f8 key on one of your boots if you are not having success and go into a VGA mode if it is an option presented to you. Let us know how you get on with this. Good Luck Kaz

If this were my machine, I would try a ps2 mouse and keyboard to eliminate Mice/Keyboard being the culprit.

I agree - you cannot use wireless devices until drivers are loaded and you cannot load drivers until Windows loads. PS/2 keyboard and mouse drivers are built into XP.

All: One of the suggestions was to load Win2K again. I did–with a drive reformat–and it was done and up in under 30 minutes. The disk I used was an OEM disk that I originally used to upgrade form Win98se, so I assume that none of the Service Packs are on it. I rebooted it–all was OK. I then took all the USB-devices out of the system (the mouse and keyboard, the external hard drive, and a multi-card reader), and then rebooted in Win2K with the PS/2 mouse and keyboard from the other machine–all went well. I then went to try an upgrade-type install of XP–it didn't get through it. I then decided to go for a full install of XP, with the "quick" reformat of the hard drive. The setup aborted once, restarted itself, and went all the way through to rebooting and asking me if I wanted to enable automatic updates, I selected yes, the the machine hung up on me. I rebooted, and the system came all the way up. I was very surprised and happy, to say the least. I messed with the desktop and Start Menu appearances (from XP to Windows Classic), and reconnected the external hard drive–it was recognized by the system. I then tried to restart–and it wouldn't get past the "Windows is shutting down…" screen. I shut the thing off, disconnected the hard drive, and attempted a restart–no luck; it hung up at the "welcome" screen. I restarted the machine in Safe Mode, and checked msconfig. I have nothing in the Startup menu at the present time–at least nothing that is showing up in msconfig. I have a lot of items listed under the "Services" tab, though. OK–I've gotten the thing to come up in a "normal" mode twice in four days of trying. I know it comes up and shuts down in Safe Mode with no problems. What do I do now? I'm still very confused–about almost all of this. –TvH

Greetings all If I may suggest, please dont stress to much over a box of electronics, it just isnt worth it. There is a logical reason that it doest work and we just havent discovered it yet. Aproach it as a interesting challenge and it has nothing to do with you or your skills. You are doing it right. Folks here will keep feeding you ideas to get a resolution if we can. The hang on welcome and the hang on shutdown still points for me something that chokes trying to load and chokes on shutting down when booting and shutting down from normal. I would still have a look at the event logs and see what you can determine as a possible faults. Any sort of system error should be listed there. A alternative way to get at boot issues is to enable BOOTLOGGING from the f8 menu. Here is a link the will give you pictures of what it looks like and how to use it. Link——->http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-enable-boot-logging-for-fixing-startup-problems-in-windows.html See what you get. If this is not successful at getting at the problem, You may need to consider that the gear you are using just isnt going to move into Windows XP. If you will post the Details of the computer you are working with. MODEL, MAKE, (compaq presario 12345R , Dell inspiron 1234 as example) I and others can look to see if there was some sort of patch or firmware change that needs to be in place to go to XP. Or special instructions based on your computer. Good luck Kaz

Thanks for the reality check. It helps. So does going to work and dealing with other stuff, which is what I'm doing right now… The machine is a Dell Dimension XPS-T500 with a P3 500 MHz processor, BIOS A11, and 768 Mb of RAM. I have a 32 Mb Diamond Viper 770D AGP card, a 32K US Robotics fax/modem, and a Sound Blaster Live! Value audio card as original equipment. I installed two items over the years: an ASOUND 10/100 network card, and a 5-port D-link D520U USB 2.0 card. That might be overkill on the description, but it can't hurt. Before I went into work this morning, with the PC running in Safe Mode, i checked to see if there were any device driver glitches showing up in Hardware Manager. There weren't–apparently XP had drivers loaded that would work with the cards installed in the machine. Whne the PC booted up into XP last night, everything seemed to be running correctly, so I'm somewhat comfortable with the hardware working–once things boot up, that is. I'm a bit confused by the f8 menu reference. When I boot into Safe Mode, I have to press the f8 key during BIOS startup, immediately after the RAM check, so I'm sure I'm missing something here. I'll check the link you provided, and see if that helps me out with that. Thanks for all the help and patience. I'm now more certain that the machine will run with XP, but if it doesn't, I can still run Win2K (but have to get the Service Packs and patches again somehow…..). Feeling less lost–TvH

Greetings all

Getting the service packs for Windows 2000 after a short google led me to this download site. Link—–> http://www.download.com/Windows-2000-Servi…4-10210715.html

So thats one to put in the back pocket should you need to go there. Seems all you need is the Service pack 4, all the packs are rolled into one on that one.

Mind you its about 130mb and will download a .exe, might be handy to burn off and keep.

Regards
Kaz

Greeetings all

Well did some looking about the Dell site on your computer. Your bios is at its latest version A11 so no joy there. Seems they list the last supported OS is Windows2000. Without running your service tag specifically, we are looking at a box from 1999-2000 or so? Windows 2000 maybe the best this can do and run with any sort of stability.

Did find for sale computers with your model number with Xp on them (not from Dell) already for about 70.00, so there is still hope we can get you there.

I still would pull every card except the video and see what the machine does. Logic says on a XP clean install not all device drivers would be found or loaded and might cause it to choke on start up.

Dell provides a interesting troubleshooting wizard for Xp issues, and does mention pretty much the things we are trying. Safemode boot ups, modifying the msconfig, removing devices ect.

You might like to run through it yourself to see if a step or two was missing. Link—–> http://support.dell.com/support/topics/glo…;l=en&s=gen



Good luck
Kaz.

All: I ran bootlog (and I get the f8 reference now–thanks!): As expected, I hung up at the "welcome" screen, so I went into Safe Mode, and read the log. Things got installed until this message showed up: Did not load driver Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC This was followed by a group of other drivers that wouldn't load–and were repeatedly trying to be loaded with no success, according to the log. The list of drivers not being loaded (repeatedly) grew, with some drivers being loaded as it went along until I manually rebooted the system–about 5 minutes after it locked up. Most of these were drivers for the modem, network card, video card, sound card, some legacy devices, codecs, and the like. The first item on the list that didn't load was never repeated in this sequence. Likewise, near the end of the log was a string of .SYS files that wouldn't load, mentioned only once each. I can list all the stuff that didn't load in order, and if it was mentioned only once or repeatedly, but that would take sometime. A driver named ACPI.sys was loaded early in the going, so I'm uncertain why another one was mentioned and wouldn't load. What do I do now? –TvH

Greetings all

Some failures are to be expected, Windows Xp has many many drivers included and it will try to load them even if the device does not exist on your computer.

Here is a link explaining some failures you might see. Link—> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/127970

What you should be looking for is failures on devices you know you have installed and not loading. That ACPI does seem troublesome though.

Acpi may be one of the culprits here (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)), Xp is maybe not liking the Power management on this PC. Usually this is a mainboard/Bios thing. We are at A11 and is the latest bios Dell lists for this computer. But again this is for Windows 2000 supported. Is there a enable/disable ACPI entry in the Bios? If there is, toggle it from its current setting. Give it a reboot. Success?

To check in Windows, whether your PC has ACPI, use: Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Device Manager. Click 'view by connections' radio button. 'Advance Power Management' should be on top of the list. In this case WindowsXP has found the hardware and added ACPI for you.
If not then ACPI can't be to blame for the problem. Get the chipset drivers on this board (maybe in a drivers/application disk from the 2000 set)



Getting any other fix for the ACPI is something I am sadly lacking in expertise. Barring mainboard/bios patch update being availible (my normal route); I have read a possible proceedure but not having done it myself and is not harmful that I can see if you are willing to try.

You can force it to accept the ACPI by re-installing WinXP again, but where it says to press F6 to load RAID drivers, press F5 instead. That will give you a menu where one of the options should be for ACPI - choose that.

But back to the bootlog, look to see if there is failures on things you know you have installed that are refusing to load.

Good luck

Kaz

Kaz: It's working right now. Don't ask me why it came up, but it did. Here's what happened: I went into the BIOS setup, and shut off the power management, and tried to reboot (with boot logging active)–no good. I then rebooted in Safe Mode, and went to look at the boot log. I had two entries–one for the first boot, and one for the second (into Safe Mode). The second one looked just like the one I men tioned in the earlier post–lots of stuff not loading repeatedly, and the mention of ACPI not loading (although in both cases ACPI.sys did load). I decided that I'd reported to you the results of the wrong log, and went to try to get you the correct one. I went back into the BIOS setup, turned the power management back on, restarted the boot, turned the boot logger on, hit enter–and the system came up. I still looked at the boot log. Here it is: Service Pack 2 8 20 2008 19:18:27.500 Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\hal.dll Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\KDCOM.DLL Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\BOOTVID.dll Loaded driver ACPI.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\WMILIB.SYS Loaded driver pci.sys Loaded driver isapnp.sys Loaded driver intelide.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\PCIIDEX.SYS Loaded driver MountMgr.sys Loaded driver ftdisk.sys Loaded driver dmload.sys Loaded driver dmio.sys Loaded driver PartMgr.sys Loaded driver VolSnap.sys Loaded driver atapi.sys Loaded driver disk.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\CLASSPNP.SYS Loaded driver fltMgr.sys Loaded driver sr.sys Loaded driver Fastfat.sys Loaded driver KSecDD.sys Loaded driver NDIS.sys Loaded driver Mup.sys Loaded driver agp440.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\processr.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\nv4_mini.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\fdc.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\serial.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\serenum.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\parport.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\i8042prt.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\kbdclass.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mouclass.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\cdrom.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\redbook.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\imapi.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbuhci.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbohci.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbehci.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\cinemclc.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\sfmanm.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\ctlfacem.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\emu10k1m.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ctljystk.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\gameenum.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\USR1806V.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Modem.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\RTL8139.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\audstub.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\rasl2tp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ndistapi.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ndiswan.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\raspppoe.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\raspptp.sys At least I have a reference point to start from if (when?) it doesn't reboot again. I don't think this is over–yet. Now I'm really scratching my head–TvH

Greetings all Well we have the Gift Horse and shall not look in its mouth! I think Xp finally was happy with ACPI, it may have took toggling and un toggling it and a few boots to get it to load. All in all we got plenty of troubleshooting in and everyone benefited. Lets send good Karma that it remains stable and you can get the thing done you wanted to in the first place. Regards Kaz.

Kaz: True, but…..I haven't tried a reboot just yet. Before I do…..I'll 1) Load Zone Alarm Basic Firewall 2) Load AVG Free 3) Try and connect to the in-house network 4) See if I have an Internet connection If I have any further problems, I'll start a new thread….I think this one's about through. Thank you all for your help and consideration over the past few days-I was close to a basket case a couple of days ago, and now I'll just watch the USA men's team make 'em…. –Tom vonHatten