Last week, I had a good go at installing OSx86 Snow Leopard on my AMD system. Not being able to get it to work fully, I gave up and decided to go back to windows.
The whole time during my OSx86 attempts, my windows installation remained fine. The last night of attempts, I decided to switch my PC off and go back to windows in the morning and do a clean-up operation. It should have been pretty straight forward, I installed OSx86 on a physically separate hard disk, so a mere format was required.
Turns out not. Windows repeatedly froze at the welcome screen and refused to boot into safemode. Always pausing at an ati dll (of which I stupidly forgot to take note of specifically.) I found this behaviour very unusual because during the whole ordeal with OSx86, I hadn't laid a finger on the windows drive at all.
At this point, I decided to do a fresh install of windows 7 on my SSD. Everything was going totally fine for over a day with the install. All drivers and apps installed. Then on my home server, a 1TB drive which I'd bought a couple of months ago seemed to be acting strange. I'd had suspicions about either the (built 2006) home server's SATA controller, I'd noticed some controller errors in the windows logs on that machine so I decided to move it over into my main PC for a bit of extra testing.
This is where the real problems started popping up. Thinking things were fine, I'd left my computer for some reason or another and came back to find a BSOD. Apparently one of the most ambigious ones..
0x00000F4 Source: Bugcheck
After a short panic, I decided to restart the system swiftly. Shortly after, I received another BSOD, this is when I noted those couple of details and started to look into it.
At this point, I thought the blame should be down to the 1TB drive I was testing so I removed it. I didn't receive a BSOD after this but a more unusual behaviour started to occur. At random (but no longer than 20 minutes into using the system after a boot) the system became unresponsive. Not totally frozen, I could in fact click buttons and get a visual response but nothing would result from it. The start menu would open and close but I couldn't launch anything. Windows remained moveable but the contents of them locked up. Chrome wouldn't let me scroll. the SMART drive checker I was using to diagnose problems halted. So it was sort of semi-frozen
At this point, I removed both 250GB drives from the computer (mainly in desperation) and tried to boot. Oops, turns out the windows installer had installed the bootloader onto one of the drives I removed, rather than the drive windows was installed on. So I tried windows recovery and let it attempt to put the bootfiles onto the right drive which in turn caused a sort of "fixing boot files" loop, the windows bootloader was actually working but rather than booting, only ever went back into recovery again.
SO! I decided to install windows again. This time with hitches. At first, it froze at "Installing windows files: 0%" So I started the install again. The next time, it froze on the name your computer screen. The next time it froze at the "setting up your desktop" screen. And then at the desktop the next time around.
I managed to get to the windows logs, they didn't shed any light on this installations troubles, just a couple of unexpected shut-downs, all of which were made by myself when the system was unresponsive.
So, all I can think of now is that the usb stick I used for windows install was bad and I'm waiting for a friend to lend me his to try that one.
I know there's a lot of text here but I just wanted to be concise.
In short:
- After failing a successful osx install I went back to windows
- Windows refused to boot
- Reinstalled windows
- Fine for a day
- Trouble shoot an extra drive in this machine
- System becomes unstable with 0x00000F4 BSOD
- System becomes unresponsive at regular intervals
- I remove all drives apart from SSD with windows installed
- Have to reinstall windows due to a Windows Recovery loop
- Install takes several attempts to get to desktop
- System remains unstable
I'd just like to point out that when installing OSx86, I never attempted any crazy things to get it to work. I didn't do any bios downgrades, I didn't flash my video bios for compatibility or anything like that, they are things that I wasn't prepared to try to get it to work, so if somehow that process damaged my hardware, it would have been done purely with software. To which I'd be extremely surprised is the case!
another note: The windows install was working without a hitch for 6 months prior to the OSx86 Attempt...
Hope it wasn't tltr!
Thanks for any hope and help you can provide!
Specs:
Windows 7 Pro x64 | MSI 870a-G54 mobo | Phenom X2 555 BE @ 3.8GHZ | 8GB DDR3 1333 | ATI HD 6850 1GB | 60GB Vertex 2e Primary | 2x250GB Storage | Dell 2007wfp 20" | Dell 1905fp 19"
The whole time during my OSx86 attempts, my windows installation remained fine. The last night of attempts, I decided to switch my PC off and go back to windows in the morning and do a clean-up operation. It should have been pretty straight forward, I installed OSx86 on a physically separate hard disk, so a mere format was required.
Turns out not. Windows repeatedly froze at the welcome screen and refused to boot into safemode. Always pausing at an ati dll (of which I stupidly forgot to take note of specifically.) I found this behaviour very unusual because during the whole ordeal with OSx86, I hadn't laid a finger on the windows drive at all.
At this point, I decided to do a fresh install of windows 7 on my SSD. Everything was going totally fine for over a day with the install. All drivers and apps installed. Then on my home server, a 1TB drive which I'd bought a couple of months ago seemed to be acting strange. I'd had suspicions about either the (built 2006) home server's SATA controller, I'd noticed some controller errors in the windows logs on that machine so I decided to move it over into my main PC for a bit of extra testing.
This is where the real problems started popping up. Thinking things were fine, I'd left my computer for some reason or another and came back to find a BSOD. Apparently one of the most ambigious ones..
0x00000F4 Source: Bugcheck
After a short panic, I decided to restart the system swiftly. Shortly after, I received another BSOD, this is when I noted those couple of details and started to look into it.
At this point, I thought the blame should be down to the 1TB drive I was testing so I removed it. I didn't receive a BSOD after this but a more unusual behaviour started to occur. At random (but no longer than 20 minutes into using the system after a boot) the system became unresponsive. Not totally frozen, I could in fact click buttons and get a visual response but nothing would result from it. The start menu would open and close but I couldn't launch anything. Windows remained moveable but the contents of them locked up. Chrome wouldn't let me scroll. the SMART drive checker I was using to diagnose problems halted. So it was sort of semi-frozen
At this point, I removed both 250GB drives from the computer (mainly in desperation) and tried to boot. Oops, turns out the windows installer had installed the bootloader onto one of the drives I removed, rather than the drive windows was installed on. So I tried windows recovery and let it attempt to put the bootfiles onto the right drive which in turn caused a sort of "fixing boot files" loop, the windows bootloader was actually working but rather than booting, only ever went back into recovery again.
SO! I decided to install windows again. This time with hitches. At first, it froze at "Installing windows files: 0%" So I started the install again. The next time, it froze on the name your computer screen. The next time it froze at the "setting up your desktop" screen. And then at the desktop the next time around.
I managed to get to the windows logs, they didn't shed any light on this installations troubles, just a couple of unexpected shut-downs, all of which were made by myself when the system was unresponsive.
So, all I can think of now is that the usb stick I used for windows install was bad and I'm waiting for a friend to lend me his to try that one.
I know there's a lot of text here but I just wanted to be concise.
In short:
- After failing a successful osx install I went back to windows
- Windows refused to boot
- Reinstalled windows
- Fine for a day
- Trouble shoot an extra drive in this machine
- System becomes unstable with 0x00000F4 BSOD
- System becomes unresponsive at regular intervals
- I remove all drives apart from SSD with windows installed
- Have to reinstall windows due to a Windows Recovery loop
- Install takes several attempts to get to desktop
- System remains unstable
I'd just like to point out that when installing OSx86, I never attempted any crazy things to get it to work. I didn't do any bios downgrades, I didn't flash my video bios for compatibility or anything like that, they are things that I wasn't prepared to try to get it to work, so if somehow that process damaged my hardware, it would have been done purely with software. To which I'd be extremely surprised is the case!
another note: The windows install was working without a hitch for 6 months prior to the OSx86 Attempt...
Hope it wasn't tltr!
Thanks for any hope and help you can provide!
Specs:
Windows 7 Pro x64 | MSI 870a-G54 mobo | Phenom X2 555 BE @ 3.8GHZ | 8GB DDR3 1333 | ATI HD 6850 1GB | 60GB Vertex 2e Primary | 2x250GB Storage | Dell 2007wfp 20" | Dell 1905fp 19"
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