On 29/07/10 22:35, Anthony Anson wrote:

Tried to reinstall Win 2000, but it wouldn't do so. Got about halfway through the process then stubbornly refused to play any more. Borrowed an XP disc, and that wouldn't load, same symptoms as the 2000 CD. Put an old NT HDD in the BeOS tray, and that wouldn't work, so tried an old Win 98, and that was OK, as was the 98SE.

Moving NT between hardware by swapping drives rarely works, it's usual to get a BSOD in these circumstances as it tries to load a driver for something that isn't there. With PNP support W2k and XP fair better but still have issues sometimes. Have you added any hardware that win2k/XP suddenly might not like ? Also make sure that your installation media is the same service pack revision if you are attempting a repair installation and a reasonably high service pack level if trying a clean one, As it is possible that some hardware support was added in a latter SP revision that causes issues on previous revisions. If you only have older media there is a process to build a new installation disk from that with a latter SP level via a process called slipstreaming. A lot of older AMD based kit was built on a troublesome VIA chipset and needed patches from VIA to the installation before it would work. Some Creative sound cards from the era your machine was new were also particularly troublesome and could cause all manner of issues even at OS installation. I think it was the first SB live cards that caused me an issue with a SMP W2k box at a previous employer. Plug in card and boot to a BSOD, remove card and try to reboot...BSOD...Note I hadn't even got to the adding drivers bit at this stage so nothing should have changed...Nice Another potential issue is RAM, not sure about Be but 98 can be blissfully unaware that it's memory contents are being corrupted. It's not more resiliant it just doesn't often notice as much. Have you run a full pass of memtest on the box ? It's possible that the NT kernel is running into a bit of faulty ram not often hit in say Linux. How does W2k/XP fail during installation and at what stage ? Failures at or before say the partitioning stage can point to a problem with the mass storage controller (you might need to add specific Storage drivers at the F key prompt) Later failures (at say the copy stage) can point to faulty drives (optical or HDD) or media issues. Can you run smartmontools against the disk you are trying to install Windows to ?

Now, I'd like it to work with XP or 2000, but I have misgivings about trying to run Virtual Box under Debian to host 2000, which I would guess, will fall over.

A VM should not have the same issues assuming it is a compatibility thing..if it can run the Host OS reliably then it should make no difference what hardware the VM is run on. That said given the age of the machine you need to make sure you have plenty of ram to accommodate both the Host OS and whatever you want to assign to the guest. Either guest or host running into swap causes massive performance issues on a VM