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I just upgraded from an ancient Athlon 850 to an ECS RS400-A motherboard, and Intel P4 640 CPU. When I try to boot my system, I get a "Blue Screen of Death" telling me that Windows has detected an error and is shutting down. It told me to run chkdsk on my drives (which I did by hooking them up to another system, no issues). What should I do?

Note, I did not reformat my drive prior to upgrading. Should I have?

Hello and Welcome to Techspot!

You can try to run a windows repair on your system. It may fix you up.

If not, then yes you will have to reformat.

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately (I forgot to mention this in the original post) When I try to boot from the Windows XP CD it goes through the initial setup process, and then right when it says "Starting Windows" on the bottom of the screen, I get the same BSOD error message.

Ouch. That sucks <-- useless sympathy

Is your ram compatible with your motherboard? Give us a detailed list of your system parts.

Also, you should probably post some of your minidump files for someone to take a look at.

I will try and post some of the minidump files if I can later on...

As for my system specs, they are:

ECS RS400-A Motherboard
Intel P4 640 CPU (3.0GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
ATi Radeon 7500 AGP video card (128MB)
Sound Blaster Audigy XGamer sound card
512 MB PC2700 DDR RAM (1 stick)
10 GB Western Digital hard drive - 7200 RPM
60 GB Maxtor hard drive - 5400 RPM

That is pretty much it

Well, sorry to break it to you, but it will have to be a reformat
and a clean reinstall...

The thing is, when you upgraded the MoBo, you changed the
the infrastructure of IRQs,ACPI and resource/request
handling completely,
and Windows cannot correct that big of a
change, it can handle card changes, CPU, RAM, hdds etc.
but not MoBo upgrades... It's just the way the WinXP
HAL (Hardware Abstract Layer) was designed.

I hope you have everything saved and backupped so the
reinstall will be quick.

you can try a windows repair from the CD

I really doubt trying Windows Repair will work,
the whole HAL has to be changed, not some files,
and there is only one time when Windows configures
it's HAL (well, in most cases that is) - during the initial
setup.
Repair can manage to fix a lot of things, but I think it
doesn't reconfigure the HAL from scratch.

And even if repair worked - your XP would be running
slower than if you had done a clean install.
If you have everything saved and prepared, reinstallation
doesnt take much time, and you're much better off doing a
clean reinstall...

i just bought and built a new computer and I used the ecs rs400-a motherboard with the intel p4 630+ 3.0ghz cpu. When I start it up to install a new copy of xp it just displays the rs400-a logo and freezes. I have found that if I clear the cmos I can get the bios to post but only once. After reboot it just goes back to the logo untill i clear it again. any help would be great.thanks

Can you get in the BIOS?
Did you try loading Safe defaults?
Have you tried flashing the newest BIOS?
Does it even boot up the XP CD?

Try to provide more detailed information, and also what you have already tried...

Okay I know this post is a few days old, but I'm just gonna say this anyways:

I built a new system several months ago, put in my old HDD, ran a Repair, and it worked. There are several files missing, so I can't do a bunch of things, but I am almost positive that it is because of a different problem... I think my XP disk is scratched.

yea whenever you upgrade to a new mobo it is a good idea to reformate for windows to run stable

I had the same problem when I got that mother board...
For windows xp/2000 i have tried it on....and it is not acpi compliant....
which means that it can't control the power functions on your computer...

Like after you shutdown you get the old screen of "It is now safe to turn off your computer" and so you have to hit the button...and you can't put the board into standby....

That is why it wants you to reinstall windows, because of the acpi problems...

For some reason it also had IDE hard drive trouble and my hard drives read/write at a extremely slow speed of 1 mb/s...slower than my internet connection....hmmm

let me know if you have any of the same problems...