I upgraded my motherboard and ram, to a MSI K7N2, up from a K7-266 pro2. I also changed the ram, 512 corsair pc3200. I left the default bios and tried booting. I get to the very first nano second of the xp boot screen, then it goes to a quick blue screen of death. After that, it loops into a restart cycle, doing the same thing over and over. Any ideas on what could be causing this or how to trouble shoot it?

It's customary to reinstall the operating system after a motherboard upgrade. You can cheat by doing a repair installation--it will reinstall all your system drivers and keep most to all of your programs in working order.

BTW, which K7N2 motherboard is it? I just got the K7N2 Delta-ILSR, and it's incredible.

I had this problem with my sister’s computer she got it from dell, the only way we got around this was to format the HD and start fresh, and there is not any other way.
Sorry for the bad news.

Hope it has helped,

Matt

since its happening at the same place it could be bad memory where the failing bits are being accessed only at that point in the boot up, but more likely it is a windoze problem. Have you tried scanreg /fix from DOS?

Anybody know if its possible to get cd-rom support within safe mode? Always wondered about that. It would help with this mobo install problem we all have.

Hey tropic what are you liking about the board? I've heard good things about it.

@johnoh

I actually stumbled upon this board after setting up a small office network--the senior partner asked me to build the best AMD system I could for under $1,500 in hardware costs. Lucky girl.

First off, it's rock solid. The onboard peripherals (LAN, SATA RAID & 6-channel sound) also use an incredibly small amount of CPU time and give great performance. The Promise 20376 SATA RAID controller has none of the performance issues of the Silicon Image SIL3112A that you see on so many nForce2 & nForce2 Ultra 400 mainboards. The most pleasant surprise is that I can run two 512MB sticks of generic Samsung 400MHz DDR RAM at full speed without any stability or latency issues.

All told, after I saw how well it performed with two WD Raptors in a striping array, I went out and bought the mainboard and two Raptors for myself. I thought I'd have to buy some high-end Winbond 5ns sticks from Crucial, but the generic stuff is working great for me.

Thanks for the fast replies.

If I boot into safe mode, it hangs when it loads System32/drivers/mup.sys

Oh, and the board is a DELTA-L. Ive used MSI in the past, and I am VERY satisfied, and will be a loyal patron.

Ill give the repair os a try. If that doesnt work ill test some new memory.

Also try unplugging all pci cards and also going into bios and disabling any on-board features like lan, modem, sound.

Seems like the only os i can get to boot is mandrake 9.1. Anyone know if I install mandrake, and insert the XP cd will it let me do a repair from there?

You don't need to install Linux... when you do the repair install of XP it will overwrite Linux' bootloader, anyway.

I cant get XP to boot from CD. I remember it always working before, wonder why its not now.

New motherboards ship with default BIOS settings that commonly list boot devices like such:

1. Floppy
2. HDD0 (primary hard drive on IDE channels)
3. CD-ROM
4. ATA/RAID/SCSI controller

Just go into the BIOS and rearrange the order so that the CD-ROM is listed before the hard drive.

Oh, I've done that already. And you're right, they do list CDROM after HDD-0.

I am having the same problem. It happens with two different drives that I have win2k already installed on I can't even get rescue or repair to work, I am about ready to pull out a linux install CD just to format the drive so I can install windows. Did you ever find a solution?

Hello,

I have had the same problem recently with a K7N2 Delta mobo and athlon XP2700+. Windows wouldn't even install. It kept giving stop errors 0x000000A and 0x26 and some other.
It seems that XP has problems getting sufficient rights to devices for it's install process.

The solution FOR ME was:
-Downgrade my system speed (fsb from 166mhz to 133)
- Disable all nforce2 onboard devices(audio,lan etc.)
- Reinstall windows XP
- Install Nforce2 drivers
- Reenable devices one at a time and check drivers.
- Put my FSB back to 2700+

After that everything seems fine... Go figure!

I had the same issues with the IO address errors, etc. I killed the processor, so I thought. I get the new processor in today and the fans would kick on for half a second and shut back off again. I plugged my old Duron back in and the system booted. It didn't get to the OS though. Then I smell smoke!!!!! I power it off and try the new processor again. The system stays on but now the LED's show that the processor is either not installed properly or it's damaged!!!!!!
This is the very reason I bought the second one. Now when I even try to use the old processor it will show that the processor is damaged or not installed properly!!!!

I'm loosing my mind!!! I have no way to test whether it's going to be the processor or now the motherboard. This is getting really expensive.

What should I do????

Hey cursed i am having the same problem as you. I have a k7n2 but it wouldnt boot up, then i bought another processor and the same thing. i took it to a local computer store where they troubleshoot it with another memory stick and psu but sill nothing...All that is conected to the mb is a vid card processor. Need serious help.

Just a thought. I ran into a simalar problem. My fix was a higher wattage power supply.

Thanks for the responses, at least I'm not alone. Here's my situation:

MSI K7N2 Delta-Ilsr. I have disabled everything I can, but I still can't disable the RAID. Anyone know? Anyway, I finally get it to boot off of the winXP cd, and try to go into the suggested repair steps. As soon as I try to do ANY kind of install, it says a HDD wasn't found on my system. WTF?

The Mobo, when it posts, it checks for IDE devices. It sees the HD,and the CDrom drives. But then the XP disk doesn't. What gives? I don't want to do a clean format and install, but even if I wanted to, this wouldn't let me. ACK! :)

Thanks for any help.

I just put my K7N2 fsb333 machine together and it won't boot for anything. The very first time I turned it on it started to install XP (which would have been fine with me). I noticed that my IDE cables were backwards (CD ROM was primary master) and I freaked out, shut down my machine and switched them back. I figured after that I should clear out the CMOS, so I did. I went back into the BIOS and put my CD rom before my HD and all should be hunky dory, right? Wrong!
My computer flashes the bios, correctly itentifies all my drives, and then goes to a blank screen with a damn blinking cursor. I'm going crazy!!!
Any advice?