To reinstall or not to reinstall.......... BUKU issues!

[oosik]

I'm kind of at wit's end with the amount of errors and problems and I'm guessing I'm going to have to just reformat and reinstall.

Here's my sob story for those that want ot pretend to care:

OS - WinXP SP1

NAV - during live update, manually executed, the NAV engine won't update always fails. I've tried every everything posted on Symantecs website, to no avail. I even posted on the symantec's website board and their live help is even stumped.

BSOD's - have had about 5 of them in the past week all different, at different times during different programs.

Knowing things were going awry, I decided to start backing up everything for he inevitable. Well Roxio's DirectCD is known to NOT play well with WinXP, so I try Neros InCD. Gets part of the way through of copying to a CDRW and then get some failure and it never copies everything. Tells me the disc(CDRW) is write-protected all of a sudden. Have to reboot or pop the cd out then back in to clear. So taht's not working as it should.

Tried repartitioning with Partition Magic 8.0, no go. Get errors saying the file name system is something or other.

Tried imaging with Drive Image, that also gives me errors so I can't image anything.

Tried Norton Ghost, again, failed with BSOD.

Shutdowns and startups and pretty darn slow unable to resolve.

Tried going back to a system restore point long before anything like this came up, still no joy!


Believe it or not, most everything else seems to work, but obviously there are issues that can't be resolved. Heck if I can't even back things up to CDRW properly, then what do i do.

I'm not sure if it's a hardware issue or driver issue or even how to resolve if it's either. I have gone through a couple of tweak guides that are out there. But I know I didn't disable things I knew were going to cause issues. And those things I wasn't 100% sure about I didn't change anyway.

Anyway, that's my rant. Not sure when i'll actually get to redoing everything; still figuring out the best way to go about it without losing a whole lot.

[larry1135]

What version of NAV?

[glc]

Time to use Nero or Roxio *burning* software to back your stuff up to CDR's - forget packet writing RW's if it's giving you that much grief. Uninstall NAV and ALL nonessential programs, get the system back as close to a baseline install as you can.

[morriswindgate]

You don't have Kazaa installed on that system do you> I have seen similar stuff when a virus was downloaded from Kazaa. If the system was working fine before you can always do a restore on WinXp to get it back to before the problem started.

[larry1135]

What version of EZ-CD creator do you have? Certain versions of NAV and EZ do not work with XP. Before you do anything radical you may want to uninstall NAV see what happens if still acting up then try uninstalling the Roxio. If you have a partitioned drive I would start saving data that you do not want to lose to one of the logical drives.

[oosik]

Once again, thanks to everyone that so willingly helps me out as often as I'm on here trying to resolve things.

As my sub-title states.........(you're going to love this)

STATE OF NUCLEAR MELTDOWN


Last night as I pondered the options for saving my stuff, I realized I had all of creative software on my system that I know I never used and figured i may as well uninstall it. Don't use, why have it? The computer says to reboot for changes to take effect after the uninstall................

{let me digress}
Remeber Norton Ghost I used to try to back things up, well when it didn't work i uninstalled Ghost, completely
{now, where was I}

......The computer reboots, all of a sudden Norton ghost starts to image my d: drive, WTF!!! So i figured well let it image at least i'll have a back up of it anyway. 30 minutes later it finishes and reboots......

{ready for this???....you might want to lay down}

......now I have a black screen with a blinking underscore cursor!

That's it!!!!!!!! And the IDE light goes on steady. I disabled the IDE drive in BIOS just to get it to boot off my c: (scsi) drive, nope, same thing, black screen and blinking cursor!

I'm at work trying to get out early so i can figure out what the heck to do with it.

I tried booting with a western digital diag boot disk just to look at the drives, but I can't get to any other drive. When I go to c:\ dir it ells me 0(zero) files.

I guess I'm in the hurt locker now! Bios sees all hardware and drives.

Can someone please just shed one tear for me!

:confused:

[oosik]

Originally posted by larry1135
What version of EZ-CD creator do you have? Certain versions of NAV and EZ do not work with XP. Before you do anything radical you may want to uninstall NAV see what happens if still acting up then try uninstalling the Roxio. If you have a partitioned drive I would start saving data that you do not want to lose to one of the logical drives.

I never install EZ-CD after ai found out all the probs it had with XP. This was when I had Win2K and decided not to insstall it at all when I went o XP.

[mike breck]

I'd format and reinstall XP with minimum hardware - monitor the results.

Then add hardware and programs one at a time - monitor the results.

Add SP1 and monitor the results.

If a piece of hardware of software is causing problems, then the one-at-time approach should help to pinpoint the cause.

A clean install of Windows is always better than upgrading.

HTH

[larry1135]

Sounds like the Norton Ghost may have trashed the boot record.

[mike breck]

What interests me is what partition Ghost seemingly made the image to. If it made it to the Windows partition, then the partition may be full.

But then wouldn't Ghost complain it had run out of space.

Just thinking aloud.

[oosik]

Originally posted by mike breck
What interests me is what partition Ghost seemingly made the image to. If it made it to the Windows partition, then the partition may be full.

But then wouldn't Ghost complain it had run out of space.

Just thinking aloud.

i had originally told it to image to c:\images\dbakup.gho. it calculated it would need about 8gb of space, I had 11gb available. I guess the script kicked in, why when i uninstalled the creative software is beyond me.


i have since reinstalled XP onto C:\(scsi) again! of course my drive letters are all screwed up. what a nightmare. I'm going to remove the audio card for now and my usb 2.0 ports and disconnect the ide drive to get the letters where they should be.

i'll let ya know. thanks!

BTW....since this is a another new install, would it be best to set my irqs manually....it was mentioned in another thread of mine on similar issues?

[oosik]

XP is not very smart. Even tho I told it to load onto the 18GB scsi it loaded system files on to the d:(now c:) drive.......ah hell...here I go again
re-re-reinstalling..............does it ever end?


I've built about 6 systems for myself over the years, I don't ever remember having this many issues!

[mike breck]

Maybe you should delete your partitions and start from scratch again.

Might make it easier to monitor things a bit more carefully and identify problems as they crop up, this time.

[oosik]

Mike~
I only have 2 partitions they are both hard drives, c: 18gb scsi and d: 100gb ide.


everything is getting straightened out now, the drives are organized the way they should be. As it stands now, compared to before, I pulled out the audigy card and will probably leave it out for a couple of days just to keep an eye on things. I disabled USB 2.0 in BIOS and disabled the extra usb ports I don't use. Installing NAV into c: drive, as opposed to d: drive, now and seems to be going okay. Mobo drivers, nvidia drivers seemed to have gone ok. Once I'm confident most things are in their proper place I'll probably image both drives. Once d: is imaged I'll probably reformat that one while I'm at this again.

I can't help but wonder if that SB Audigy card has issues for some reason. I noticed a number of ppl having probs with it and giga-boards on the VIA Arena forums.

that's where I"m at now.......

[bailey]

you do not want to use the motherboard drivers when you have xp for the os, xp has much better drivers for the motherboard.
having both will cause your kind of problems.

[oosik]

Originally posted by bailey
you do not want to use the motherboard drivers when you have xp for the os, xp has much better drivers for the motherboard.
having both will cause your kind of problems.

which drivers specifically? my agp will only run with the VIA drivers...that from experience. Besides, aren't the VIA drivers supposed to be more up-to-date than the MS drivers? Seeing as though they are updated more often.....