I recently tried to upgrade my OS from Windows 98 to Windows XP Professional . While installation was ongoing the monitor screen went black and just stayed black. I pushed the reset button on my PC and it restarted and finished up installation. It finally completed the entire installation then it went to a blue screen saying "Windows was shut down to prevent errors on your computer, If this is the first time you have seen this screen restart and if you see it again follow these steps." Then it gave a set of directions in case it came back up. Well I restarted but it didn't come back up and Windows XP looked like it had been successfully installed. Then I started installing all my stuff, printer, MP3 players, media devices, etc. and then when I finished installing Roxio CD recording software it told me to restart my computer to complete and I did. Then the blue screen popped up once again and said the same thing. So I restarted it and the blue screen was there again. The instructions said to restart in Safe Mode and uninstall any new software or hardware so I tried to start it in Safe Mode but it did not work and a black screen came up with all this lettering that said some like ms/thgsad/dssdff/afdsa a lot of times in a row. It wouldn't start in Safe Mode and when I tried to start it normally it just went back to the blue screen. What could the problem be? I used a burnt copy of Windows XP but now I have a actual original disc. Could that be the problem?
Lil Pun, Are you sure that you waited long enough for Safe Mode to run? (Sounds like you saw the screen with the text and panicked...) With Windows XP, you will see several rows of weird-looking text when booting in Safe Mode, but the GUI does appear after about a minute or two if you have a lot of stuff installed on your pc. Try starting Windows in Safe Mode again....
My friend's HD went bad and he would allways get "Windows shut down to prevent errors to disk" before it died. I hope your's isn't bad.
Problems like what he described are more often caused by defective hardware/driver installation or bad RAM. To come on and say with certainty that a problem is caused by a hard drive when that isnt even high on the list of likely causes of the problem isn't a good thing. Some people may actually believe you. Pun, as I just said..it is more than likely a RAM problem, that is what I would check first..and as Blastoff said...it sounds like you paniced too quickly waiting for Safe mode to start...the text on a black screen is normal behavior for XP in Safe Mode. Give it time to finish starting up. also...while I havent had many problems upgrading to XP...the large amounts of differences in supported hardware between 98 and Xp may cause problems while installing drivers. My advice... Take out everything(all cards) and just leave your drive and CDROM installed...and do a fresh install. During Xp installation, they will give you a chance to define partitions for the install...delete all existing partitions(after backing up your important data of course) and recreate a partition for your Xp install.....then install. After it is completely installed, put in your removed hardware one by one until you start getting problems..then you know where the problem lies. Also, if possible, go online before you start reinstalling the devices and make sure you have XP-compatible drivers for your hardware. any other problems, just let me know.
Ur.... Win 98 going to Win XP... Not sure if that's a great idea. But Have you ever given Linux a thought? RedHat 9 is quite slick.
Naw, I dont agree. Suse still requires a few brain cells to get working right. RedHat or Mandrake are totally geared towards Windows users. I havent used them in a while, but I have it on good authority that RH and Drake are the way to go for noobs. I personally prefer Slack or SuSe..
I have a Western Digital 40 GB HD and a Western Digital 20 GB hard drive. I am trying a new approach guys, I have got rid of the upgrade and thanks to a student I know at the local university I can get Windows XP for free, an original copy not burnt. So I am going to try reformatting my hard drive and installing that whenever she can check it out for me. Windows 98 is working fine on my computer with no glitches at all so I think it had something to do with that copy of Windows XP and not using the original version because when I tried to setup from a clean hard drive my computer told me there were no setup files on the disc so what I had to do was install 98 then install XP over 98 and I think that may have been the problem. We'll see. What do you guys think? Also, nobody ever answered my question, how do hard drives, RAM, and computer components in general go bad? Is it bad to reformat your hard drive too many times, will it damage it?
In my experience...some components are bad straight from the factory, but you find out about those pretty quick. There are a few that have borderline problems that may become evident soon after being put in service, but those are few and far between. Mostly, when componanents go bad, they have just come to the end of their effective lifespan. As I noted before, your problems may have just been driver issues on the 98 to XP upgrade path. You are going about it in the proper manner, install XP straight to a new partition.. Your 98 install may have been working fine before, but there are real issues with upgrades from 98 to XP. Thats why I feel that the way you are going about it now should ork for you.
Hey but what about the second part of my question, does reformatting your hard drive damage it in any way or not? I'm going to have to reformat my hard drive to get a fresh start but can you reformat too many times?
SuSE was the only distro that configured my system correctly out of the box. Slack was the only one that worked correctly in the end, but it took a lot of tweaking.
OK, what is the difference in Windows XP Professional and Home editions? Will there be anything different about this copy that a student is going to check out for me at the university?
R2K said that there was a performance issue between 98 and XP, maybe some of my drivers or something.
Sorry for not catching your previous posts..I spent what little time I have been on in GARM the last couple of days. Ok...formatting. No, you will not damage it by formatting(unless you do low-level format, which you dont) I have never heard anyone say that multiple formats will shorter a drives lifespan. Home vs Pro.. the differences arent anything you will probably ever notice, just use whichever version you can get. Supermac, While it is possible to do an upgrade from 98 to Xp with no problems, the support lines where overwhelmed when XP first cam out by people with problems ...so just consider yourself lucky. Azadre, tats one of the reasons I love SuSe, great installation, easy configuration...but you can get down and dirty with low-level configuration just like the best of the hacker's distros if you so desire..
