Problematic installation on old Aopens.

[dvornik]

I have been struggling with installing Win2k on 2 Aopen machines based on AX6BC motherboard using PIII 733 MHz, newest BIOS.

http://www.aopen.com/products/mb/ax6bc.htm

One of the machines lets me install windows but after a day or two it developes a really long delay durind splash screen. Then sometimes it starts getting blue screens (ks.sys) after that. Yesterday instead of blue screen it quit the boot process during the loading bar and informed me pci.sys was missing or corrupt. Chcdsk from recovery console helped, but there are still long delays on splash.

The other identical machine wouldn't let me install windows. It stops during copying files and informs me that certain files (many files) were not copied properly and there may be a problem with the CD. Then it comes to blue screen with kernel error.

The BIOS is new, it has extensive controls but I stick mostly to defaults except for setting the processor speed. Is that an IRQ issue or something? I got a "Driver_IRQL_not_les_or_equal" once. Don't know what to set them to, though, the conrols are rather advanced.

It is a win2k SP3 CD that was used successfully on other machines.

 

[dvornik]

I was wrong about ks.sys error. It was a blue screen during intallation on the first machine that I got around by taking all the PCI cards out.

 

[dvornik]

OK, a more specific question. How do I deal with IDE controller errors? In the event log I get several errors indicating that IdePort0 didn't respond within timeout period and a message saying "the driver detected controller error" on that port. That's why I get the delay on boot.

I was able to install windows on the other machine after installing an older version of BIOS.

 

[dvornik]

I think I fixed it. Turns out these errors (11 and 9) happen when IDE controller doesn't support ATA66 and the hdds do support it. Had to set it to PIO.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q262448&