Date: 02/28/06 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: virus

Hello, respected geeks. I have a question and I beg of you to offer some solutions, if you please...

My computer recently had a couple viruses and a few vulnerabilities, so I figured it could use a reformatting. I didn't like how it had been set up--although I did build it myself ('03), my guy friends took it upon themselves to upgrade it from 2kPro to XP Pro "for me" while I was studying freshman year of college. They loaded my OS onto this old 6GB hdd and utilized my 80GB to act as main storage. Of course, this was inconvenient, as I had to load all program files on the storage hdd. Well anyway, I purchased a 250 GB western digital hdd and an apparatus to turn it into a USB external, and backed up all my files I wanted to keep onto it. I then removed the 6GB, put the 80GB in its place as primary master IDE, and booted from the XP Pro CD.

I formatted. It started installing Windows. At 33 minutes remaining in setup, it froze--well, not froze completely, the little boxes in the bottom right corner were still blinking, and those stupid ads MS runs for its product toting how wonderful XP is kept blinking past, but...there was no progression in the installation. For Three. Hours. Finally, I came over and hit the space bar, then the enter button--and I got

The Blue Screen of Death.

I tried again. And again. And again. I had formatted, partitioned, reformatted, deleted partitions...all with the same result. Except that instead of freezing at 33 minutes, it would just go straight to the BSo'D. I tried a DFT--a drive fitness test...tried using a '98 boot desk, CHKDISK, SCANDISK, and FDISK. A fellow geek suggested maybe in my re-partitioning, a sector had just not completely un-partitioned, and therefore was a stuck...sector. Or something. Whatever, I figured this was not working right.

So I copied my backup onto this computer and tried taking the 250 GB out of the external USB apparatus and replace the 80 GB with it. Same result. So it's not my hard drive.

The BSo'D error says something about kernel...data...loss? something like that. It's in the middle of the "Installing Devices" process. It suggests turning off any caching or shadowing in my BIOS, but I don't see any options like that in my attempts to edit my BIOS. It also suggests trying to ensure that any hardware is installed correctly. Everything looks right--for god's sake, I built it. In BIOS it recognizes both sticks of 512MB, so I don't think anything's wrong with them. The only thing I've changed is which hdd is in there! :(

Please tell me you guys have some suggestions. I humbly beg for your advice.

Thanks in advance,
Kitty <3

x-posted: geeks, computergeeks

EDIT: Thank you all for your help! I unplugged the additional USB ports I had added, the zip, and the floppy. We're still in the middle of XP setup, but it got past the wicked 33 minute mark. Much obliged!!

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/885405.html