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Home > Archive > General Discussion > August 2001 > Problem with Gateway PC!
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Problem with Gateway PC!
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| XtremeFighter 2001-08-14, 9:54 pm |
| Hello everyone,
Today I was over a friend's house to upgrade his Gateway PC. First, I added 128 MB PC 133 SDRAM. Now he has a total of 192 MB SDRAM on his PC. Second, I had to install an external USB CD-REWRITER. After plugging it in windows recognized a new USB device so it asked me for the drivers. I put in the floppy disk which had the drivers, and installed them successfully!
After that, I had to install Easy CD Creator 4.0 which came with the CD-Burner. During the installation of Adaptec Easy Cd Creator, the system is halted and I get a message in a typical windows blue screen:
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
System Halted
The tile of this message was: "While initializing device IOS ".
I restarted the Gateway PC, and after windows ME has loaded the GUI files, the system is halted, and the blue screen comes up with the same error message again.
I used the Windows ME boot up disk to load windows with the disk. The first thing I did is start Scandisk from DOS, to see If any files are damaged in the PC. The whole directory "Adaptec Easy CD", was having errors so I told Scandisk to fix them.
Tried to restart the computer, but the same message came up again. By the way, I tried to restart in safe mode but I couldn't. The system is halted every time after the Windows GUI files are loaded.
So in other words, I could see the big Windows ME Loading screen, but then I receive the big message that there is protection error. I went to the system BIOS setup, and set everything to default, just in case any changes were made there, but no success! 
The only thing I could think of was Formating the harddrive, since I couldn't get to windows. So after formating the harddrive I put in the Gateway Windows Installation CD. (At this time the CD-burner is not connected to the PC via USB). After Windows copied the temporary files to C:\windows needed to load setup and restarted, the Windows GUI appeared (Windows ME Loading), and then it gave me the protection error again, so I couldn't even continue setup...
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
System Halted
The tile of this message was: "While initializing device IOS ".
I am desparate at this time, because I did everything I could. I have seen the Windows protection error a few time in my computer, but after restarting it, everything is O.K.
The case is different here. I don't know what is causing this Protection error and halting the system.
I need your help! Has anything like this ever happened to you? Remember, the source of all this was the installation of Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.0.
Thanks in advance,
XtremeFighter | |
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| Try this...
Format hdd -> a:\format c: /q
Install win9x/me with original cd, not the gateway recovery cd.
Also, if you have win98, install that other than winme.
Try to install it then, and if all goes well, first install the video card drivers and then sound card ones. Then install the software for the USB device FIRST, then shutdown, and insert your cdrw into the usb connection, and then boot up, and it will recognize the cdrw and install nesseccary s/w for it.
After that, DO NOT INSTALL Adaptec cd writer, download and install Sony CD Extreme from...
http://sony.storagesupport.com/dlag....3.390Setup.exe
That should work. Also, make sure you get the latest drivers for your USB cdrw, and the correct ones for your OS aswell.
I hope this helps,
Azam | |
| Gareth Leung 2001-08-15, 7:02 am |
| Go to the CD writer's manufacturer's website and check for updates and instruction for installation for Windows ME. | |
| XtremeFighter 2001-08-15, 7:07 am |
| Hey Gareth,
That would be a good advice for my "ignorant" friend, but not for me.
I will follow Azam's advice, and fortunately I have a CD of Windows 98, and a WinME Upgrade so I will see what I could do with
those.
Regards,
XtremeFighter | |
| Pavlov 2001-08-15, 8:11 am |
| ***CAUTION***
YOu may find that you're chasing the wrong gremlin here. A guy I work with brought his Gateway in to the office for a "routine" upgrade. Everything blew up. We were trying to upgrade the darn thing from Win98 to Win2k - not even messing with external attachments. Gateway loads a "Gateway Goback" utility that made it impossible for us to do the upgrade. Ultimately Gateway reps told him he'd have to bring it to a Gateway center and they would have to do the upgrade (proprietary BS).
Also, we had the pleasure of installing an external CD burner to a workstation at the office and the drivers for it caused the blue screen. When I uninstalled the external device it took ALL my CD drivers with it. It left me without my own internal CD
***ADVICE***
If you are going to upgrade the OS to Win2k, stay away from Adaptec ver. 5 Platinum. Adaptec was swallowed by a company called Roxio and I don't think that they believe in QA. They have stated that if you perform the "normal", i.e., the default that the average user would use, install you are guaranteed to not only see the blue screen but will need to spend many hours rebuilding your system from scratch. Unfortunately I learned that one the hard way
If you have Win98 and the machine will let you, then load it instead of ME. ME just plain sucks! It is, by far, the most unstable OS I have ever seen.
Another good choice for CDR software is a program called "Click-n-Burn Pro". After I reformatted my system at home, Adaptec software no longer saw my CDR. It saw that I had a CD there and it would give me the exact model #, but when I launched Adaptec it said No Recordable Devices. I loaded the Click-n-Burn and everything works like a charm. Now I just need to clean that Adaptec garbage off the machine.  | |
| Gareth Leung 2001-08-15, 8:39 am |
| quote:
Originally posted by Pavlov
If you are going to upgrade the OS to Win2k, stay away from Adaptec ver. 5 Platinum
I'm using it in a Compaq & a clone running Win2K Pro and works find.  | |
| Gareth Leung 2001-08-15, 8:41 am |
| quote:
Originally posted by Gareth Leung
I'm using it in a Compaq & a clone running Win2K Pro and works fine.
Not to mention my Mac too.  | |
| Yeti-GBR1 2001-08-15, 9:14 am |
| If you want some good advice...DON'T BUY GATEWAY's
I have heard nothing but horror stories about them and I have had to rebuild a fair few in my time...I HATE them along with DELL's | |
| techdaemon 2001-08-15, 9:33 am |
| Personally.. I've heard that Gateways and Dells are the best.. and I think they are..
I work on hundreds of Compaqs, HP's, NEC's, Packard Bells ect. a week and I think that they are really crappy.. especially Compaq.. | |
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| techdaemon 2001-08-15, 9:47 am |
| Very true that no one oem machine is all.
For the record. Don't buy extended warranties for oem machines.. they're garbage. My company sells them at Circuit City, Office Max.. and they're just trash.. people pay 300 for a warranty that sux. | |
| CatWoman502 2001-08-15, 12:11 pm |
| I have about 25 Gateway PCs in my office and I have replaced over ½ of the HDDs and the systems are not even a year old yet. My last shipment of PCs came from IBM and I have not had any problems with those, YET! Depending on what restoration CDs you have with that system, I know the newer ones have 3 CDs. Try booting from CD 1 and when you get to the dos prompt type GWSCAN. This gives you an option to write zeros to the drive, so it would be like from the factory. I don’t know if this will help. You will have to repartition it and format it again, but any traces would be gone of the old opp system. | |
| XtremeFighter 2001-08-16, 10:15 pm |
| Hello everyone,
The problem was kind of tricky! I got it when I was installing Adaptec Easy CD creator, but that wasn't what caused the problem. After doing a low level format (writing 0's) to the harddrive, and installing Windows ME again, I received the same problem. So, I was 100% that there was nothing wrong with the harddrive. Going back to the upgrades that I did to the Gateway PC.
I also installed a 128 MB PC133 SDRAM stick... The bios recognised it, and at the Windows properties tab the memory was added.
Before giving up on the hole thing, I thought of removing that new RAM that I had installed and to see if that was the problem!
Well, guesss what? That was the problem...
And remember this, all the blue screens that may stop windows from loading are associated with "Memory problems".
After Installing everything back to the PC, I installed the RAM Stick again, and everything worked perfectly! The thing that I don't understand though is that I didn't have any problems or memory errors when I installed that DIMM RAM. Windows booted properly, and recognised it.. So that's what fooled me, I didn't even expect that that would be the problem until the end!
Sometime you have to go a long way to solve a simple problem!!! 
Regards,
XtremeFighter | |
| CatWoman502 2001-08-17, 7:51 am |
| That gets me wondering, I was having a problem yesterday with a Gateway PC and blue screens. Just about every other day it would come up and tell me that the .dat files for the virus software had been corrupted and that I need to reinstall. After about the 4th day of this it just started giving me blue screens when it would boot. I was wondering if it could have been the memory, but I don’t know. I uninstalled it again and removed everything from startup, even paths and it stopped. I think the registry is hosed and I just worked around it, but this PC has a lot of funky software that she needs to do the Health Care enrollment and I really don’t want to reinstall it. So I added each path that she need back one by one so all of her programs work again, but man what a pian. I took me almost an hour to get that thing to boot without problems. This is a Win98 PC and the virus software is McAfee. |
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