So i am building a machine for a friend, its a pretty nice one

athlon 64 4000+
2x1gb sticks of Geil ddr2 800 4-4-4-12
ghetto HDD (its just his old one till he gets a replacement. its a maxtor fireball 3 lololol)
GeForce 8800gs 320mb, by eVGA
nf590 chipset mobo by XFX

anyways... got everything put together, checked the bios settings and set up the ram settings and such, booted and Windows (an old install) insta-crashed with a bsod, and restarted to a blank black screen, not even the little white dash pinging in the top left.

So... i decided to try formatting the drive and starting over. Everything went well with re-formatting the HDD, but on booting into windows setup the system would freeze or just restart to that blank screen again.

I thought it might be the HDD, so i pulled my 300g sata drive out of my own comp, with almost identical hardware save a 7900gs and an nf4 ultra mobo, and booted up, got up to the windows XP welcome screen and got the usual "hardware radically changed, you have 3 days to reactivate windows". I selected no to wanting to do it right now, (with the keyboard, i thought was interesting, though i was running a USB mouse which wouldnt work. it got power but no control of the pointer. was thinking cause the chipset hasnt been installed? o_O but it worked w/o chipset drivers when i have built other systems.) Anyways, once the windows welcome splash closed i had, the first time, about 10 seconds of normal boot before a 1minute shutdown notice, stating that "c:\windows\system32\services.exe" (i think) has terminated unexpectedly. status code 1073741819. next few restarts just went straight to a bsod after the welcome screen, then restarted instantly before i get a chance to look at the bsod report.

i also got a message when the welcome screen is active about having replaced registry keys from backups, which scares me, because its the registry on my personal harddrive, not his empty one >.<

i've tried with no network, and i can get into safe mode but the USB still wont work. wireless card removed, changed ram slots, etc, but to no avail.





any suggestions?
thanks.
-John

Select the hard drive you want to use in this new build. Place the drive in your system as a D drive, and low level or zero fill format the drive. You can get the format utility from the hard drive's manufacturers website. Format the zero fill using a standard NTFS format. Place this dive in the new build as C and install the OS

Thanks for the reply,,
but... it is my personal harddrive and, at the moment, i have no backups.
i will use this as a last alternative, are you sure that this is the only fix?
also... what exactly is wrong?

update:

okay so i put my 300g sata drive back into my personal machine, and it booted up fine, no problems. Which tells me that it isn't a problem with the harddrive itself. I tried both an IDE and an SATA drive in this newly built machine, each had the same problems. Are they on the same hardware controller on the Mobo? might that be the problem? any ideas?

UGH! here we go again.....

1. NEVER "re-use" a copy of windows installed on one system or motherboard onto another. Not only will it NOT work, it is also illegal (even if the motherboards are the same model.)
2. start with the basics, strip the system to the bare minimum. Ensure you have all the latest BIOS files and DRIVERS.
3. ENSURE your ram is compatible with your motherboard, when in doubt RTFM.
4. ENSURE you have adequate power plus 30% for cushion. Use a wattage calculator. Google it. They're free.
5. Read the guides in the guides forum. Also FREE!
6. If one hard drive isn't working, try another.
7. YES, you will need to re-register windows, once installed. Requires a phone call.

i have tried starting with a fresh harddrive, i have brand new driver CD's and also reflashed the bios already =/