Constant restart at boot. SP2 only

I found this great site searching for answers to an XPSP2 problem. My old AGP system board smoked some capaciters so decided it was time to uograde. I upgraded the hardware to an ASUS M2V 64 bit PCI Express motherboard and AMD dual core 3800+ processor and ATI X1300 display adapter. Did a repair install with SP2 slipstreamed XP disk. When booting it would flash the XP screen and reboot. Ran through the following tries:
1 Repair with basic XP disk booted OK. Added SP2 & it failed.
2. Restored several Ghost backups with SP2 all failed.
3. Tried old PCI Nvidea display card failed.
4. Clean install of slipstreamed SP2 disk works fine. Dreaded option!!

It will boot into safe mode ok. If I select VGA only from the safe mode menue it boots ok and I can then change the video resolutions. I booted with no restart on error option and found it is getting 0x--7E error causing reboot. Scanned the driver directory but there are a lot of drivers in it. At this point I added /SOS to the BOOT.INI file thinking it would list the drivers it is trying to install. Surprise it boots up without failure. Probably because it is loading the default vga driver initially. I have not yet determined where the list of drivers is it initially loads. Somewhere in the registry. I checked for dump files but it is aparently too early in the boot to generate one.

I just read the sticky on drivers and downloaded Driver Cleaner and will try it as I am sure when I remove /SOS from the BOOT.INI file it will fail........

Sorry for the long post but felt it was necessary to get all the facts in....

 

Hi,
SP2 does not seem to like the way the drivers are (pre)installed.

I would first try updating the chipset/motherboard drivers before trying to install SP2.

I do not use driver "cleaners" and would be extremely hestitant to use them on graphics drivers which are quite complex. ATI have a driver "uninstaller" and I would even suggest running that in safe mode if it would not work in normal mode. The driver "cleaners" will have a statement to use them at your own risk. I would feel much safer using the ATI uninstaller.

After uninstalling the ATI drivers I would boot to the desktop using standard drivers (which you say you are using now) and then run the drivers/software installation program from the CD that came with the card. The last time I looked at the ATI website, it said there were no updates for the (Catalyst) drivers for Win XP and that Win XP installs it own version. I have had trouble with the drivers Win XP installs so I uninstall them (using Add/Remove Programs, maybe in safe mode) and install the software and drivers from the CD (I uninstall in safe mode and install in normal mode). If the drivers from the CD run to my satisfaction, I don't bother looking for further updates.

So my suggestion is to update the chipset drivers, uninstall the ATI software and drivers in safe mode, then install the drivers from the card's CD. After that, run the SP2 install.

Luck,
Matt

 

All drivers in the system are the latest. I don't believe in doing a clean install of the system because to clean out the drivers. This can be done manually with a little thought. The last clean install on this system was when I upgraded from 98 about five years ago and has been through three sets of hardware and still runs fast and stable. This problem is being caused by a driver being prefetched that is not compatible with the PCI Express bus. I am reasonably sure of that. I just haven't put together all the locations the boot sequence gets the lists from. I have cleared out about half the old drivers from the driver directory. As i mentioned it fails with a 0x0000007e stop but unfortunatly doesn't list the driver nor does it generate a dump to analyze. I have cleaned the PCI Express ATI drivers several times and reinstalled them with no help and I also removed them and installed a PCI Nvidea card but no improvement. The system runs stable with no problems. The only problem is if I remove /sos from the boot.ini file it gets the 7e failure and reboots. I will find it in time. It has been a long time since I had to debug from the assembler level so I am doing a lot of digging.

 

Found one or two things.

Stop 0x7E:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/900485/en-us
it has a fix .exe.

You receive a “Stop 0x0000007E” error message after you upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 on a non-Intel-processor-based computer
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888372/en-us

Clean boot:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353/en-us

It's been a while since I read through XP startup troubleshooting steps. For Win 98 you can run a "startup log" and there is a stepwise driver loading option.

Matt

 

The AEC.SYS fix didn't solve anything. The other urls I have been through a dozen times. I am still trying to learn about the intelppm.sys. It is in the driver directory and if I remove it doesn't solve the problem but is reinstalled from a cab file at startup. There has never been an intel cpu in this system since XP was installed. I also have a long list of unsigned drivers I need to work through.

 

I'm confused... you state this:

4. Clean install of slipstreamed SP2 disk works fine. Dreaded option!!

So I don't understand. Is your rig working now that you've done a clean install or is it not?

I hope you're not trying to do a Windows Repair after going from a old (Socket A) board to a newer (PCI-E) board? I'd rather get cavities filled at the dentist.

 

It did boot fine with a clean install of a slipstreamed SP2 disk. Why not do a repair from a socket A to a PCIE board?
Everything works fine except for the boot problem and PowerDVD. Fixing the problem is just a matter of learning enough about XP to diagnose the problem. As it is now I have a way around it so it is transparent. After 40 years of troubleshooting computer problems T prefer to diagnose and fix the problems Rather than dump and run. It is just a learning curve.

 

Problem is fixed. Caused by IPVNMon.sys left over by something in the past as it is nowhere else on the system other than the driver folder. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions...

 

Well done, thanks for letting us know what is was.

Searching, it seems to be part of internet connection software. There may be a possibility it is installed by malware, so run extra scans.

Matt