Hello everyone, I have a bit of a serious problem on my hands... I hope some of you veterans can help me. I bought 2 pc's for my office. PC ONE = Gateway DX4640-UB101A which comes with: Intel® Pentium® Dual Core Processor E2200 * Each core operates at 2.20 GHz * 1 MB L2 cache * 800 MHz system bus 4 GB (4096 MB) 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (two 2048 MB modules) 320 GB 7200 RPM SATA II hard drive NVIDIA GeForce 7100 integrated graphics Up to 256 MB of shared video memory PC TWO = GATEWAY 4200-UB101-A which comes with: AMD Phenom™ X3 8400 Triple-Core processor * Each core operates at 2.1 GHz * 2 MB L3 cache * 3600 MHz system bus AMD RS780 consisting of: * Northbridge: RS780 * Southbridge: SB700 nstalled: 6 GB (6144 MB) 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (two 2048 MB and two 1024 MB modules) Integrated ATI video Ok so bare with me here... heres the scenario, I will try to be brief as possible. First I needed dual monitors for the PC ONE, the INTEL one... So I purchased the following video card for it e-GeForce 8800 GTS pci-e. When the card arrived, I realized the power supply in the Gateway was crappy and not nearly enough to handle the new video card so I ordered this power supply: OCZ GXS 700 Watt / OCZ700GXSSLI So once the power supply arrived... I decided it was time to go through the whole installation process but I had a few things I wanted to change first. First, I took the 500 GB from PC TWO and swapped drives... I wanted the better machine with the larger HDD. Once done, I installed all the hardware, took the 500 gb and tried DOWNGRADING to Windows XP from Windows Vista. I havent really been keeping up and didnt realize Microsoft doesnt allow this, so now with the new, upgraded hybrid monstrosity I created... the DX4640-UB101A had a HDD from a different Gateway, a new video card and new power supply... When trying to run the disc to install XP it would start the "windows setup" blue screen and load a bunch of DLL's...after which time, it would simply give me a blue screen of death that stated: "A problem has been detected and windows needs to shut down to prevent damage to your computer" blah blah blah (if you need the rest of this, let me know) Technical Information: STOP 0x00000780, etc, etc... Ok, so I realized that Vista keeps a partition in there to prevent any other version from being installed... of course, my next step was to write zeros to the drive and start from scratch. I started with Active Killdisk via a USB stick. I would boot to it and run the whole one pass zeros thing only to have it stop around 13% and send me to a completely blue screen.. no text, just screen. Ok I thought, Ill try DBAN, which worked like a charm... 13 hours later, my 500gb drive was wiped clean of any Windows crap and I was free to install XP... wait, no I wasnt. When I put in the newly zeroed out drive and ran the Windows XP disc, I got the same message??!?! Windows needs to shut down? What windows? As far as I knew Windows had been wiped off my HDD and no, there are no other HD's in the machine or removable disks with Windows. Ok, so I figured "maybe some part of the memory that I am unaware of, keeps a boot record which still, will not allow this OEM pc to have XP installed". I unplugged everything, took out the RAM and the CMOS battery... waited about 10 mins to clean out the boot records and bios and crap and tried again. Still, gives me the same error... it wont even let me get to the part in the Windows Setup menu that states "delete partition" or whatever... it just crashes. A tech buddy of mine says that perhaps, because these are meant to handle up to 8 GBs or RAM, the architecture is such that it requires Windows XP 64 bit and not 32 bit, so I tried installing that instead and no go. Still same error... Guys, Ive been working on this problem since Thursday, trying out different things and googling the crap out of every error and problem and solution... Im not an idiot, Ive built my own pc's for years now and they work great. However, I am no professional either... what am I doing wrong?!?! How can I fix this and get back my pc!? UPDATE: I tried putting in a 10.2 GB IDE drive which I had running XP on a backup machine... to "reformat" that and get the PC to work off that in the meantime. No go. Same error, even on a new, different HD it will not allow me to install Windows XP. I disabled the Motherboard NVIDIA boot agent 249, thinking perhaps that has some lock on it to prevent new installations. Do OEM manufacturers do this? Ive called Gateway for the recovery disk, Im at my wits end. Help me please! I apologize if this is NOT a hardware problem but frankly I am having a hard time figuring out what the problem is, Hardware or OS??? Thanks!

BTW, I should add the the AMD PC, the one I placed the 320 GB HDD in, took the the writing zeros just fine, I was able to get XP Installed afterwards and havent had any other issues with that. So now its just the one malfunctioning. Thanks for all your help in advance.

It sounds as if you have a bad CD/DVD drive. If it can't load the Windows XP CD on startup, it might be something to do with that. Also, you do need a 64 bit OS to handle any MORE than 4 GB of RAM. A 32 bit OS will handle 4, but you will only see 3.5 GB of available RAM. When writing zeros to the disc, does it delete partitions? Often times, OEM computers ship with an "invisible" partition for restoring Windows Vista. Try a hard drive partitioning program from Western Digital. Boot it up from a floppy drive and see if you can consolidate the hard drive to a single partition. crappy OEM comptuers...

Why would you buy OEM systems & immediately butcher them, tossing their warranties right out the window? You would have been better off building from scratch. OEM systems usually put a hidden partition on the HDDs for doing a system recovery, however, once you swap the drives, the recovery discs are useless. Apparently you're using a retail XP CD for the installations? I won't even ask if it's "legal" or not...if it's not, do NOT say so. That sort of stuff is frowned upon in these forums & may result in your thread being deleted. Were you able to find XP compatible drivers for all your hardware? Network & audio drivers are particularly hard to find when you "downgrade" a system that was designed for Vista. As spoonman said, if you're running a 32-bit OS, anything over 3GB of RAM is pretty much wasted. If you install 4GB, you *might* be able to make use of 3.5GB but it depends entirely on your hardware setup. 6GB is definitely a waste on a 32-bit OS though. And why would you run DDR2-667 with an X3 Phenom? If the board supports it, you should be running DDR2-1066, if it doesn't support it, you should at least have DDR2-800. DDR2-667 will bottleneck the system. I wrote this a while ago to help explain the 32-bit/4GB issue: http://www.computing.net/howtos/sho... What type of office do you run where you would need a high performance gaming card like an 8800GTS? You could have done better with your PSU choice.

I agree with jam on all he pointed out. In addition, I suspect you were running Active Killdisk from within Windows and that is why it failed. Did you order restore disks for BOTH computers? You should restore the drives to their original locations. If you need more storage space then add another drive. DO NOT attempt a restore with the add in graphics card installed. Remove it and use the integrated graphics. You can install it AFTER restoring. You should have posted here PRIOR to buying anything. The main advantage of buying an OEM PC is the CHEAP operating system that is included. If you didn't intend to use it you shouldn't have bought a PC with Vista installed. There are still some PCs available with WinXP pre-installed. "A tech buddy of mine says that perhaps, because these are meant to handle up to 8 GBs or RAM, the architecture is such that it requires Windows XP 64 bit and not 32 bit, so I tried installing that instead and no go. Still same error..." That MAY be due to SATA controllers on the motherboard. WinXP doesn't natively support SATA. You MAY be able to reset some values in the BIOS (setup) to circumvent that issue but the drive will run in an IDE compatibility mode. Other hardware in the computer would need WinXP drivers that wouldn't be on the XP disk weather 32 or 64 bit. That means you would need to hunt up drivers, assuming they are even available. Many times they are not.