I recently had an issue with the Win XP CD hanging at "Setup is starting Windows" on the Abit N7FS that I have had since 2003. I had a virus and zeroed out the drive, since two days before I had performed the bi-annual clean install that I do every 6 months, there wasn't much to lose doing it over. Then I had it hanging on setup. I tried two different CD's and even the setup floppies, which hang up on the 6th disk. I have installed XP over 10 times on this machine without problems, except when I had a USB device hooked into the computer it would give me a BSOD. I used several boot disks, tested the memory, CPU, videocard, changed out almost all the components. I bought a new mobo cause I had noticed the chipset fan went out on the Abit board, and thought maybe the chipset was overheating. Same issue on the new board though. Nothing worked. One of my housemates who is a computer tech was also stumped after a couple hours as I did some more research. After he gave up, I took the case into my room and had an idea.
I disabled the Onboard LAN and USB Controllers in the BIOS and in less than 10 minutes XP was installing. After the install, I enabled the Onboard Controllers, installed the drivers from the mobo CD and it has worked great! I am heading out to get a chipset fan right now to see if my Abit board is fine and will install XP.
Also, for those of you who aren't too computer savvy, one way to back up your data without worries is use a separate hard drive, preferably an external USB/Firewire drive. You can keep your music, videos, documents, downloads, website design files, boot disk images, device driver downloads, etc on it and never lose it. I even install all the programs that I use a lot that have backup files I need to an extra drive, so that it will still have the info when I have to format the OS partition and reinstall XP. For example, Winamp and all the skins I have downloaded over the years, several website design software, games and saved data, etc. Then you can reinstall the software into the old folder and your files will still be there.
You can get a external drive case for less than $20, or more if you need other options with it, and get a 500GB drive for $99, or find a 500GB external drive with case for the same price. I also suggest to format the drive in FAT32 so you can access the drive from DOS or older Windows versions, like 95, 98 and ME. With this recent issue, I had to use my old computer with Win 98 and didn't have access to the NTFS drive that my files were on. Rest assured I transferred them to the external FAT32 drive as soon as I got XP going. You can carry the drive anywhere and share files with your friends on their computers, MP3 players and cell phone that have USB connections. I have tens of thousands of songs, hundreds of videos and music videos, hundreds of games, thousands of downloads, website design files, several custom boot disks, thousands of pictures, ebooks, documents and backup files and it was not funny when I didn't have access to important files.
Also here is a simple way to keep all your data safe from being hacked. Either use an external drive and unplug it when you are online, or use a second computer for the Internet and transfer files from it after you download them.
I disabled the Onboard LAN and USB Controllers in the BIOS and in less than 10 minutes XP was installing. After the install, I enabled the Onboard Controllers, installed the drivers from the mobo CD and it has worked great! I am heading out to get a chipset fan right now to see if my Abit board is fine and will install XP.
Also, for those of you who aren't too computer savvy, one way to back up your data without worries is use a separate hard drive, preferably an external USB/Firewire drive. You can keep your music, videos, documents, downloads, website design files, boot disk images, device driver downloads, etc on it and never lose it. I even install all the programs that I use a lot that have backup files I need to an extra drive, so that it will still have the info when I have to format the OS partition and reinstall XP. For example, Winamp and all the skins I have downloaded over the years, several website design software, games and saved data, etc. Then you can reinstall the software into the old folder and your files will still be there.
You can get a external drive case for less than $20, or more if you need other options with it, and get a 500GB drive for $99, or find a 500GB external drive with case for the same price. I also suggest to format the drive in FAT32 so you can access the drive from DOS or older Windows versions, like 95, 98 and ME. With this recent issue, I had to use my old computer with Win 98 and didn't have access to the NTFS drive that my files were on. Rest assured I transferred them to the external FAT32 drive as soon as I got XP going. You can carry the drive anywhere and share files with your friends on their computers, MP3 players and cell phone that have USB connections. I have tens of thousands of songs, hundreds of videos and music videos, hundreds of games, thousands of downloads, website design files, several custom boot disks, thousands of pictures, ebooks, documents and backup files and it was not funny when I didn't have access to important files.
Also here is a simple way to keep all your data safe from being hacked. Either use an external drive and unplug it when you are online, or use a second computer for the Internet and transfer files from it after you download them.
