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2000 hangs setup inspecting hardware

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11 replies

by hospice_tech

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2000 was loaded on a gateway p500 and running. After a bios flash, the PC would hang at boot up. Booting with a boot disk showed the c: drive. Sys c:\ pc booted to a dos prompt. Install 98 pc was fine, Install NT4 pc was fine. run win2k checkupgradeonly, it showed a non compatibility with tape drive. removed the tape drive and upgraded to win2k the system hangs at setup is inspecting your hardware configuration. Fdsik format and clean install, same problem , hangs at setup is inspecting your hardware. What am I missing?

11 replies

by touti

After your Bios upgrade, have you edit your CMOS settings according to your Bios upgrade rules ?
Have you set "OS aware" to YES for Win2K ?

by saihib

Please see Microsoft Knowledge Base
Article Q252349 "Computer Hangs While Setup is Inspecting Hardware Configuration"

by wyldchilde

It's usually better to set PNP OS to no for 2k since it's still an NT kernel. If your motherboard and every device in the system isn't fully ACPI compliant and you're using an ACPI resource tree, that could be causing problems since it would probably put all of your peripheral devices on IRQ 9 or 11. You might also check the amount of virtual memory available in the system and edit config.nt to set files=x to a value where x=50 or so.

by panteev

Most MB manufacturers request urgently to "load setup defaults" after updating BIOS. Did you do that?

by william jay

This is especially true for Unix and like machines aka NT 4. A true hardware reset after a bios flash, including: remove and reinsert bios-hooked devices like groovy video equipment ... reset cmos to defaults, reset, check the screens in cmos setup,to make sure the devices are each seen, (*and then turn off pnp aware OS because it lets the OS rearrange the irq and memory assignments you just verified and leads to other contentions between bios and NT); reset, watch the bios settings notices stuff go by ...., let nt detect what it will, you can remove "features" and devices later. Hope this helps soon.

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