Member Avatar for Leonig_Mig

it's a toshiba portege 3440, pentium III, 192mb ram, 6gb hdd.

second user bought without o/s. for some reason whenever it is asked to load windows NT it hangs. so you can run the MS-DOS part of setup - then it reboots and hangs.

you can run windows 98 setup fine. boot from an MS-DOS boot disc - I have even installed linux although I didn't get round to installing x-windows. I even took the harddisc out and threw it into a thinkpad I have lying around - it booted straight into windows xp second stage of installation.

i tried a minimal xp bootdisc with ntldr etc on it and a boot.ini running off a floppy and again it just hung.


i'm at my wits end. come on daniweb forums - impress me with some insights. :cry: :cheesy:

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Laser

Dani AI

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The pattern described by — text-mode setup completes but the machine hangs on the reboot into the NT-family second stage, while DOS/98/Linux and even XP-on-another-machine work — strongly points at a BIOS/hardware compatibility issue rather than a bad disk or basic installer corruption. 's BIOS-update suggestion is a good start; the next checks should focus on BIOS power/plug-and-play and the mass-storage interface, plus removing any nonessential hardware.

Practical checklist (in order):

  • Update the laptop BIOS if an update exists, then reset BIOS to defaults.
  • Disable advanced power and PnP features: ACPI/APM, "Plug and Play OS", USB legacy support and any laptop-specific power options. Laptops commonly expose these as toggles that break older NT installers.
  • Remove docking, PCMCIA cards, PC modem, external USB devices and any extra RAM sticks; try install with the absolute minimum hardware.
  • If the BIOS offers IDE/compatibility modes or DMA/UDMA settings for the drive, switch to the most compatible option (PIO/Compatibility) and retry.
  • Run memtest86+ and a full chkdsk on the drive from another machine to rule out RAM/HDD errors.

Windows-specific techniques:

  • Provide the correct mass-storage driver during the installer’s text-mode step (or slipstream the driver and service pack into the install media). Many NT/2000/XP installer hangs are caused by an unsupported controller at kernel startup.
  • If text-mode finishes but the system won’t boot the installed copy, try booting with a floppy NTLDR/NTDETECT and a minimal boot.ini that explicitly points at the installed partition. Example entries:
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT" /fastdetect

If these steps don’t break the hang, the next useful logs come from a PE/BartPE environment or a serial/verbose kernel boot to capture exactly where the kernel stalls; that information narrows whether it’s a HAL/driver/BIOS interrupt (INT13) incompatibility.

Member Avatar for Laser

Have you tried updating to the release? A couple of the updates addressed 'hang' issues' in Win2k.

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