The HD in question was clean to start with, as were some of the others I've
tried - so far 40, 60 & 80 Gb Seagate HDs. Same result on all of them. All
tried on another machine afterwards with no problems. I don't use any disk
manager software - modern BIOSes can see the whole of the drive fine as is.
If this was an MBR problem then it wouldn't boot as far as it does, I think.
I've tried slowing down the FSB speed, and also the memory speed, but still
no change.
Tried replacing the Matrox G400 AGP card with a Matrox Mystique PCI card
(and changed BIOS) but still no change - it boots as far as the 'Starting
Windows' bar completes and then hangs. In 'Safe Mode with Command Prompt' I
can see Mup.sys as the last file sucessfully loaded. I think this is the
famous 'muppet' problem !
Got myself a new PSU - a big beefy 550w job - and still no change.
So far, every piece of hardware except for the processor has been swapped
out.
Before buying another AMD XP2400 CPU I'd really like to make sure something
is wrong with the one I've got.
Does anyone know of any CPU testing/diagnostic software which I could
download and run from a floppy ?
TIA
Kevin.

John7 wrote:
| Kevin,
|
| Maybe Simon has a point ...
| Is this HD brand new or was there another OS before?
| Was any Disk Manager software installed before ?
| This software survives even fdisk and format !
| Try Win98 fdisk /mbr to restore a clean bootsector.
| Try harddisk checkers / diagnostics to check the disk surface.
| The first drive sectors are essential for stable OS installation.
| As a last resort, run the low level formatter from the drive mfg.
|
| Some other thoughts ...
| I've seen PSU's that appear fine but collapse as soon as more power
| is to delivered (e.g. when PC goes into graphics mode). Now the
| m/board is outside the case, can't you hook it up to a friend's PSU?
|
| Try running your CPU at a lower Front Side Bus Speed, best is 100MHz.
| If Windows boots, run 'cpuid.exe' by www.h-oda.com to check if the CPU
| is what it pretents to be. Background: there are falsified re-labeled
| CPU's around (like 2000XP -- 2400XP, so in essence running
| overclocked)
|
| I hope we find at least something here! :-)
|
| John7
|
| "Simon Elliott" wrote in message
| ...
|| Kevin Lawton wrote:
||
||| all snipped
|||
|| Kevin
||
|| I appreciate it's not much help to say this but my combination of
|| GA-7VRXP (Rev 1.1, I think) & Athlon 1600 works fine with W2K (and
|| W95). It can be done.
||
|| If I've followed the thread correctly you've tried changing memory,
|| but have you tried a different HDD?
||
|| --
||
|| Simon