Ok techs, put your thinking caps on...

lazyart

I am totally at a loss on this one.

I have a Celeron 400 system here w/256 megs of memory & 6.4g HD that had WinME on it. I was able to get my hands on Win2K Pro, so I thought I would install it, perhaps even do a dual boot to get the feel for it before my OS exam next week.

I booted from CD, wiped out the HD and partitioned a NTFS drive for the OS, leaving a smaller portion for the eventual ME or 98 install. The install went without a hitch and the system rebooted.

I have yet to successfully boot from the hard drive. I have installed Win2k three times, using two different hard drives. It will NOT boot- instead it continuously restarts. Booting from CD works without issue however.

I have swapped memory, cables, drives, IDE channels, video cards and even the power supply. Again, this was a fully functionally WinME machine a month ago. It was overclocked a tad while installing the first time, but I reigned it back to stock settings when I started having trouble. Temps are more than comfortable. Fan is operational.

Any thoughts?

Drakonblayde

Well, in this situation, the first thing I'd do is to see if I could get anything to boot from the harddrive, starting with a Win98 boot disk and format c: /s. If that would boot, then you know the hardware is good. I'd also break the system down to the bare minimum needed for install: RAM, CPU, Mobo, vid card, CD-ROM drive, harddrive, and floppy (not sure if a floppy is actually required, but Microsoft says it is hehe). I'd turn off all onboard ports as well, USB, Firewire, Serial, Parallel, what have you, take as many resources as possible out of the equation. All the references I can find to win2k caught in a reboot loop seem to point to a problem with device drivers, so making the install as lean as possible and then adding to it would seem to me to be the best way to go. I suppose you could also see if a BIOS upgrade is available.

Have you tried pressing F8 during the reboot just to see if you can get to the recovery menu?

It is also possible that your installation media is simply no good. If you can possibly acquire a CD that is known for damn sure that it installs 2k so that it will boot properly, I'd try that before I started messing with the hardware like described above.

I have personal experiences with 2k being picky as all hell. On my game box, I'm running a board with an nForce2 chipset. It has a built in GeForce4 Mx440, and no matter what I do, 2k will go nuts if I try to use that port with the drivers, it will only work if I keep it as a standard VGA. XP likes it just dandy when I install the proper drivers. 98 is happy and stuff when I do the same. 2k Pro? Permanent degauss imagery! The most hair tearing part is that my inquiries have turned up others having the exact same problem, and others using the exact same board that have no problem at all. nVidia and MSI (the maker of the board) have not yet deigned to answer me.

RussS

Hmmm - ntfs with W2K and Fat for W98/ME always gives me heaps of problems unless I use a good boot manager. Personally System Commander is my favourite and I have had 98/2K/Linux all coexisting peacefully on one drive for over a year.

bellboy

does it give any messages before it reboots. a quick flash of a blue scrren perhaps?

i have a system with an athlon 600 that refuses to run windows 2000. it will copy the files required for setup and reboot. then shutdown. it will install xp okay, so there are obviously issues. but i have other machines in my lab that will run windows 2000, so it's no biggie.

lazyart

Thanks for the ideas everyone. This certainly goes down as something you won't see on any exam.

I pulled the HD, fitted into my main rig (from which I have already installed Win2K Adv Server once before) and it also got stuck in the reboot loop. I started a clean installation and arrived at the same result.

Bad media is what I will chalk this up to. Advanced Server will be good enough for my needs (it will have to be).

Thanks again.

Drakonblayde

Yeah, if it's doing the same thing in two different boxes, then it definetly sounds like bad media.