WOES WITH 2000 - ITS TECHNICAL SO BEWARE!

[tbettend]

Only the brave could venture into solving this problem, which I have been at for months, scouring knowledge bases and error messages, incompatibality articles, etc, etc. I am having alot of trouble intstalling W2K on my system. Here is my system specs:
SOYO SY-K7VTA-B MOTHERBOARD
1.2GHZ AMD ATHLON T-BIRD
512MB PC133 SDRAM
PIONEER 104S DVD
HP 9300 SERIES CDR/RW
MAXTOR 27GB HD
MAXTOR 30GB HD
SOUNDBLASTER LIVE!

What happens is that I encounter several problems during installation, this despite using multiple cd's. And I do take out all unneccessary periph's like my soundcard and such. My HD is freshly partitioned, I've tried both fdisk, and partitioning from the W2K bootable CD, it begins to copy files, then tells me that it cannot find certain files on the cd, for example help.exe. So, what I did try was switching in another W2K cd and hitting retry, this seems to work. But why is it doing that in the first place. Again, this happens on multiple cd's. Once I get through all of this it continues the installation, only to throw up a blue screen, siting a Page Fault, last time it was the ikernel.exe. Please, help me with this, I have been racking my brain over this, and have seemed to have problems installing W2K forever. Please help. Any suggestions welcome. [email protected]

[BigAl]

This may seem insignificant, but did you try a different CD-ROM Drive. I've had problems on one Win2K System caused by the DVD Drive. I'm not sure if it was just a bad drive or if Win2K has issues.

Hope this helps some...

[WesFlash]

Ditto the CD drive. I have a 48, 40 and an old 6 speed CD-ROM that isn't supported after I install the March compatibility update. That's a bummer for me. So, I'd try a different CD-ROM drive, check the Win2K HCL first for support.

[Platypus]

Do you have the latest bios update? I notice Soyo list incorrect Vcore voltage in the bug fixes, this could cause all sorts of problems.

The latest bios on soyo.com.tw is 2AA3 released 04/23/01

[Sowulo]

Have seen this exact problem several times, most recently Sunday installing W2K on a brand new system. Sunday's problem turned out to be a bad DIMM. I had two 256Mb PC133's on the board and one proved to be defective (another system with W2K already installed would post but W2K startup froze with the questionable DIMM installed).

[sdrawkcab]

I agree to check all these mentioned things, especially Sowulo's RAM suggestion and the CDROM drive itself... also, never forget... power supplies are NOT your friend, no matter what you think <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

[OVERKILL]

<HR>
I've encountered this EXACT problem SEVERAL times in my experience installing WIn2k, EVERY SINGLE time it has come down to a bad DIMM, once on a Toshiba notebook, ****ty generic RAM, removed it, installed a stick of Kingston and it worked perfectly. Another time on a DELL server, again, ****ty Generic stick of 128, replaced it with some Kingston I had (a stick of 256) and the problem magically disappeared. Sounds to me like you have a bad DIMM. Windows 2000 is INCREDIBLY sensitive to memory errors because it works so closely with the memory sub-system, much more so than any other MS OS and so it will show errors where 98 won't. You must have very good (normally brand-name) components in order for Win2k to function correctly. Try removing one of your DIMM's and see if that solves the problem, if not, try the other one, I doubt its both of them. <IMG SRC="smilies/cool.gif" border="0">

[GDPurple]

I have to agree about the DIMMS.

I experienced a very similar problem with a Win NT machine. Also turned out to be a bad DIMM.

[tbettend]

You guys were right. It was the RAM, my hat goes off to you all.