[pop80uk]

Hey all,
I have just brought a new motherboard, RAM and CPU to upgrade my age old Gigabyte GA-8SIML, which is P4 3.00GHz and 2GB RAM.

I have brought:
4GB Corsair RAM
Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz Socket 775
Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L iG31 Socket 775 Onboard VGA 6 channel audio mATX Motherboard

I have kept my two IDE hard drives as I did not want to loose all my programs and settings, as its taken me 4 years to get them all.

I was told that this would be possible if I brought this motherboard as the chipset would match my old one.

But now when I boot windows, it just gets to the windows loading bar and then re-starts and keeps doing this and looping over and over.

Any ideas on how to get it to boot windows please?

Thanks

[Hybr!d]

Same chipset or not many of the motherboard drivers will be different.

You need to try booting in safe mode, failing that run the Windows repair by booting off your Windows CD.

[mrberty]

Ok what you are trying to do is boot a hardware setup from the hard drive that is not connected, so it is throwing the Master boot loader off. What you need to do is plug in a hard drive with a basic os on and no drivers loaded or instaled, then plug in both of your hard drives save all your data from there and then you will need to format both drives and take out the TEST hard drive with the basic os on and reinstall your operating system on your old drives. But make sure when connected as slaves you back up the program files and all inportant information.

[mbonwick]

That's rather a drastic solution; would booting off the XP CD and choosing a repair install not work?

[mrberty]

Its not drastic mbon lol! it will work its the solution to your problem mate, this way everything will be running sweet and the way it should be, try using the XP disk to repair the OS and instaling new drivers hope it works.

[Ozzie82]

I dont know if am reading this right, but you are trying to boot the two IDE drives on a new machine?

A full format will sort that out for you. Try some way of getting all your data backed up and then format the two IDE drives with XP If your looking to install Vista, then try format the drives with XP as this gives you the option to full format the drives , Vista is only an image ,so stick with xp to get a full clean format.

Ive had this before with XP then installing Vista over it. When i went to load Vista up for a format, it wouldnt reach past loading becuse i had a faulty boot loader

[mrberty]

Ive explained the way of being able to get the data back perhaps pop, you could use one of the two drives to install basic OS on the one with not important data on then drag across to that drive save it and then fresh format on both drives.