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AMD

Weird Windows Booting Issues On Athlons? 32

Posted by Cliff from the what-could-be-wrong-here? dept.
Aj asks: "I have an AMD Athlon K7 800 (Thunderbird) that has been running fine for a week on an Epox EP-8KTA Motherboard with VIA KT133 chipset. The system runs both Windows 98 (for DVDs and games), and Linux. Today, windows will not boot. Linux boots fine, so I thought, 'Hey the Windows Boot Block has been damaged, just boot from CD/floppy, and re-install the boot block.' WRONG. Windows will not boot at all on this system, not from HD, CD or Floppy disk."

"This would normally point to something being flaky in hardware, (OS not booting from any boot device); however, it still boots Linux without any issues at all. If I try booting from a Windows 98 CD, I get the Boot from CD/Hard disk menu, but as soon as I choose CD, the computer screen goes black, places a flashing cursor in the top-left corner, and does nothing. No disk accesses or otherwise.

I have reset the CMOS settings via the Jumper settings on the motherboard, and then set the CMOS to use failsafe settings to no avail. I have tried removing all cards from the system except the video card, and I have even tried booting from another Windows Hard disk with no luck.

This is all pointing to a problem with the CPU/Motherboard not liking the Windows Boot code as far as I can tell. Has anyone experienced anything like this? I really would like the system back to the way it was working before."
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Weird Windows Booting Issues on Athlons? More

Weird Windows Booting Issues on Athlons?

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  • Linux is working fine. Windows isn't even booting.
    What are you complaining about?
    Sorry, I just had to say it..
    Seriously though, do you have a local Linux User Group? I've found the best answers to this sort of technical minutae through places/people/discussion groups like that.. (yes yes slashdot is one large discussion group... BUT)
  • Clearly your processor has made the Right Choice{tm}, saving you the bother.

  • Maybe... (Score:3)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Wednesday September 27, 2000 @04:36AM (#751119) Homepage Journal
    I don't own an Athlon, but a friend of mine had a very similar problem with his Atlhon. He kept taking it back to the shop (and fortunately they were local and they knew what they were doing), and eventually they figured out that he needed a better (and bigger) power supply. Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.
  • I know that disabling a few bios options helps with win installs. Try turning off internal and external cache on the CPU (I know this will make your pc a pig, but your using win anyway), along with any other caching/shadowing option. Can you take the disk with Linux/Win32 and boot it from another machine?
  • The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.
  • We see this issue on and off when we try to squeeze a larger hard drive/incompatible harddrive into a new system. Usually, we are able to format and ghost a system without errors, then when it boots, it just goes to a flashing prompt in the upper left corner, never to boot again. If we try to boot off a floppy or CD at that point, it just kicks out to the same prompt, like what you are seeing. The only way we can recover this is to use a third party utility, like EZdrive. the system WILL boot to an EZdrive disk for some reason. Check the disk access mode in the BIOS, and harddrive parameters. Maybe LILO is fine, boot sector under the FAT partition is freaking out. Otherwise, a larger power supply won't kill you.

  • The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.

    While this doesn't explain why windows won't boot all of a sudden (Obviously the Athlons have better taste in OS's :-) ) I was aghast to discover that my Athlon 650MHz Aptiva system only had a 150W power supply. This explained the system instability as I ramped the number of PCI cards up and is something I will have to replace if I move to a GeForce 2 at some point in the future (currently has a TNT2 Ultra).

    Windows not booting could be all sorts of problems. After a "FDISK.EXE /MBR" to replace the hard drive boot block, I would go straight to a bootable Windows Rescue CD and try from there. If you have an OEM-supplied system, this may simply format your drive and reinstall Windows, so BEWARE. Nowadays I tend to keep more critical data on my Linux partitions along with periodic key backups of source code. This is a slight pain, because it is much easier to access files on the Windows partition from Linux than the reverse, but there are utilities out there for MS systems to access ext2 partitions.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Possible fix for problem (Score:3)

    by strredwolf ( 532 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2000 @05:48AM (#751124) Homepage Journal
    UnderGroundOnline (http://www.ugo.com) has an article about this, plus two different fixes on how to get Windows working again. The problem stems from the Athilon's handling of the AGP port with some drivers (aka the drivers fault). If you can, try this out (from what I remember of the articles:)

    1. Disable AGP 4x. Go with 2x.
    2. Set the AGP aperature to 256MB


    ---
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
  • What if you try and boot Windows from LILO?
    Maybe your computer doesn't like Window's MBR?
    It may not help but it's worth a try.
  • I doubt the Windows setup.exe on the CD runs AGP drivers... but, hey - stranger things have happened...

    --

  • Hm... (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    Just a thought, but it might be that your BIOS has become corrupted. As several other people have suggested, check your power supply, too - I'd consider 250W a minimum for an Athlon system.
    The reason I suspect the BIOS is that Linux doesn't really use the BIOS once the kernel is booted, whereas Windows9x relies upon it for accessing a variety of subsystems, even after booting. If you don't mind the risk, and nothing else seems to work, try flashing the MB's BIOS with the latest version available.

  • Windows (well DOS which runs underneath) expects hardware to be in specific locations during the initial boot, once it has taken over from the BIOS boot loader. Parallel ports, serial ports, the floppy drive and the IDE controller are definitly in the DOS kernel.

    The simple DOS kernel could be getting confused by some hardware not being at the correct location, or something else using an expected IRQ.

    It is only when DOS had loaded that the Windows drivers take over.

    Poke around under with /proc under Linux to see which resources are currently allocated.

  • This is ask /. ??? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the news for nerds I've come to know and love??? This is a tech support question... I build my own boxen, and I've had troubles in the past, but this isn't what /. is all about.
  • I have a Duron 650 with GA-7ZM motherboard, and Windows takes ages to boot - probably a whole minute (not actually timed). Most of this time its doing nothing. Just sitting with the Windows startup screen, then the black textmode screen, then finally the usual desktop.

    This is newly reinstalled W98SE (like, last week), and has done it ever since then. (Upgraded from K62 with a similar problem, but no where near as long)

    I do notice network useage during the black screen. (flashing lights on the hub) It should have a static IP!

    With the K62 it wouldn't start at all if not plugged into a hub. Not yet tested with the Duron.

    Anybody know anything about any of this, and to help??


    --
  • I dunno why the K6/2 won't boot when not plugged into the hub...like the computer doesn't POST at all? Or gets to a certain point? If no post, then you've likely got a short somewhere, which the CAT5 connection is solving (?). If hung-up, then it's probably either a protocol issue, or it's really trying to use DHCP?
    The more protocols you have loaded, the longer it'll take Windows to boot. Use the minimum. Obviously, TCP/IP if you need net access. NetBEUI if you want local sharing (ONLY!), and scrap IPX/SPX unless you play an old game that needs it, or run a Novell FS.
    The less things in that Network Control Panel, the quicker your system will boot.
    Be sure WINS is disabled, and DHCP is not checked. Be sure all your network info is correctly entered.
    HTH
    Kool
  • Something like:

    Just say "No" to Windows.
  • You don't say whether the install of 98 is a "real" install, or an install from a copy of another CD (ie, a copy you don't own). We can assume you own it, but think about this:

    Might it not be possible that Windows 98 did some surrepticious "upgrading" during the night? Maybe IE5 asked to upgrade (I have seen this happen several times), and you said "sure, why not" - and that upgrade added a bit of code to cause Windows 98 to verify that it was a legal copy with M$'s servers. Or maybe it checked to see if you had Linux installed in another partition (somehow). Then, if either of these tests failed, it refuses to boot up (or maybe it erased part of itself to cause the bootup to fail, or something similar).

    Now, more than likely, this is not the case - I would look into all the other suggestions first. However, given the way M$ has been acting lately, and given all of the other crap we have seen in the recent past with companies ROUTINELY violating peoples rights and machines, can you really blame me for thinking this?

    I say you tell M$ where to stick it, and nuke the partition to allow your Linux one room to grow (unless you have some dire need on the M$ side, that isn't or can't be replicated to some extent on the Linux side)...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • What are the differences between running Intel and AMD? I don't mean performance differences. Are there many differences in terms of what software will run? I recently had some Fortran code that I was trying to link to some C code. Running under FreeBSD on an Intel box it worked fine. On an AMD Athlon some floating point flags were set on returning from the Fortran code and the next floating point operation threw a SIGFPE. Should there ever be a difference between the two platforms like that?
    --
  • I also have an 800Mhz AMD K7. I have a similar setup as you do. I have Linux on one drive (DVDs, games, everything) and Windows on the other (Diablo II.) I have had it for about four weeks and no problems. Perhaps your motherboard is bad.
  • To err is human, but to really fowl things up you require a politician.

    No, politicians foul things up. All you need to fowl things up are a chicken and a blender.

    -Nev
  • This is caused by windows trying to figure out whether it should be the local WINS Browse Master or not. It has some sort of election process with the other computers on the network to decide which one should be the local browse master. Under your network settings somewhere there should be an option to switch the browse master status to enabled or disabled instead of automatic. That should eliminate the delay.
  • set static IP
    ditch your crappy NIC drivers
    in BIOS set DELAYED TRANSACTION = ENABLED
  • Thanks for the 3 replies...

    FWIW The Duron didn't care it was unplugged while booting.

    I tried all the suggestions (most were already done...) Still no better.

    Oh, and the NIC drivers were off the disk that came with it - and it is a PCI 10/100 of reputable brand.

    About WINS, there was no difference whether it was enabled or not.

    I even tried putting the AGP down to 2x.

    Danged windows.

    --

  • Perhaps I'm being obtuse here, but why would a weak power supply bork Windows and not Linux, unless it was bound to break something sooner or later and it was Windows on this guy's system?

    I'm interested because I have a similar setup, a K7-650 on an Epox 7KXA (altho' I have a 300W ps)

  • All I know is that my Athlon system (Athlon Thunderbird 700 on a Asus A7V works perfectly fine, with Windows ME as well as Mandrake. Windows ME doesn't even get a chance to idle the CPU, since I'm running distributed.net all the time.
  • ...did /. become a helpdesk?
  • On my dual boot system, sometimes I have to wait while the cursor blinks in the upper left hand corner of the screen for several minutes. I think Windoze is doing something stupid with the NIC/network. Now if we could just get rid of MS Project, I wouldn't need their OS at all :-)
  • Perhaps I'm being obtuse here, but why would a weak power supply bork Windows and not Linux

    Perhaps you are. I refer you to a line in the post you are replying to:

    Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.

    That's probably not the whole reason. I'm trying to remember the whole sequence of events when my former cow orker had these problems. I seem to recall that another problem was that Windows was powering up his high draw graphics and sound cards simultaneously while Linux was staggering them.
  • #1. Try putting a different hard drive in, formatting it with Win98, etc.
    #2. Try FDISK /MBR from a Win98 boot disk on the existing drive (warning: may kill linux)
    #3. If you have backups elsewhere... download this and run it from the DOS prompt on a WIN98 (or DOS 5.0 for that matter) boot disk, it will ERASE the boot sector, completely. (Killing Linux along the way) zap_part.exe [warot.com]. The source code is in the same directory [warot.com] in TP 7. The password is "amber". Be VERY careful. I wrote this program to remove NT installs.

    --Mike--

  • Your right AC in that he did say he tried another drive - though he doesn't say whether it was the only drive in the system (though more than likely it was).

    I am sure that what I sugested wasn't the case, and I wasn't tring to stir the pot (ok, maybe I was a little - my paranoia gear just kicked in, is all). I appologise to all on /. if this was taken wrong.

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • I've been working on a 750 Athlon system with a Gigahertz MB and when I installed an All In Wonder Pro card in it, it started doing all sorts of weird things. I finally found that an incompatability with the CD Writer (none specific) had to be installed as a secondary master instead of slave. This resolved all glitches the system was having. This I found after re-formatting, re-installing with different options and other different cards. This was on a windows 98SE system. There seemed to be no problem under Linux at any time and this error appeared with or without Linux installed with LILO.
  • FWIW,

    It turned out to be the video card. I tried replacing the video card (to a different AGP one) and now it boots up as fast as any other Windows machine.

    --

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