Hello everyone, my "old" machine (Athlon XP 1600+, Gigabyte GA-7VTXH, 512 RAM) + new HDD [WD 40gig 8 mb cache special edition]. I installed win 98 first on the new HDD. Works perfect. all systems are fine. Now I try to install win 2k (different partition of course) I get stuck in the middle of the installation because some files are missing?! I try again and again, formatting the partition or not, choosing the option to copy all installation files from the CD to the HD or not,each time I get stuck at some stage. I thought maybe my installation CD is bad, so I got a new original copy, to no avail. I Fdisked from scratch, erasing also the MBR, installed 98 again, everything is perfect. Win 2k? same same. One time it even got to the stage of "creating start menu" and the "registering" but than it got stuck. All this time, if I choose to boot into win98, no problem at all. I did update my bios to the latest , and also reflushed it to make sure.

I give up. Any idea how come?

Appreciate any feedback on this,

thanks Maurice ???.

95% your RAM is at fault.

How come my ram?

The bios recognizes the ram as OK.

When I boot into Win 98 I see that the RAM is also OK.

I used win 2k on much older machine than that (p1 133 96 mb ram) and it worked fine.

:s05:

Neither the BIOS nor windows perform a thorough check of the RAM.

The fact that different files keep getting "corrupted" usually suggest it's the RAM at fault.

Check your ram with the following software: http://www.memtest86.com/memt32.zip

chack the CAS of the RAM as well

Can I check this stuff while in win 98?

:-\

yeah

chack the CAS of the RAM as well

that can be done from the bios

Check your ram with the following software: http://www.memtest86.com/memt32.zip

you only need a floppy drive and a windows os for that,the program itself does not run on windows

Thanks, I will give it a try.

Ok, I tested the memory using the memtest86 as well as the windows memory diagnostic (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) and the results are as follows:

The windows diagnostic did not find any errors.

The memtest did not find any errors except for the end of test 5 at the 98-99 percent stage.

than it reported 172,431 errors alltogether.

according to the documentation this kind of result may not be reliable: ("I am often asked about the reliability of errors reported by Mestest86.

In the vast majority of cases errors reported by the test are valid.

There are some systems that cause Memtest86 to be confused about the size of

memory and it will try to test non-existent memory. This will cause a large

number of consecutive addresses to be reported as bad and generally there

will be many bits in error. If you have a relatively small number of

failing addresses and only one or two bits in error you can be certain

that the errors are valid. Also intermittent errors are always valid".)

I think this looks like my case exactly.

CAS is 2.5 according to the bios

My memory cosists of two modules Kingston KVR 256 MB PC 266 lifetime warranty.

Any Idea from here anyone?.....

thanks

Your memory seems to be at fault.

I have not yet encounterd a case where memtest86 reported errors, and the system was stable.

All cases where the RAM was marginal, reported errors like yours.

Anyway, try downclocking the RAM to 200Mhz (100 DDR) and see what happens.

I will try this.

If indeed my memory is bad , do I get to use the lifetime warranty that was declared by Kingston for these modules? any experience with this?

thanks

From my experience with Twinmos RAM for example purchased at Logic, they replaced it when shown error from memtest86.

Not sure where you purchased the RAM, but they should replace it.

Well, the under clocking did it! With my FSB on 100 instead of 133, I did not get any errors at all with memtest 86 and win 2k is now up and runing.

I wonder if it is the memory after all.

thanks everyone for your help

I really appreciate it.

i dont think your aware underclocking fsb makes the cpu run at slower speed,dont get too excited :

either the memory is bad or it just gets low voltage or the cpu gets low voltage

increase the cpu voltage (also called vcore) to 1.60 and set the fsb to 133

if it wont help then increase the memory voltage , up to 2.80 is fine

increase it slowly each time just a bit,if there will be stability issues then increase it again

As said, that was merely a method of showing you something is wrong with your system.

Best bets are RAM, then motherboard and finally the CPU.