Tiger MP: She's a strange beast

[cRock]

Okay, my Tiger MP has been running happily now for a couple of months with FreeBSD. The system went together smoothly and has been ROCK SOLID.

I happened into a new hard drive last week so I decided I'd put Win2k on it. No go. When I boot from the 2k CD, I don't make it past the initial "inspecting your hardware" screen. Once it made it to the first blue screen and then had some mysterious filesystem error.

I just find all of this hard to believe. The system is perfectly stable and Windows won't even install. WTF? Is windows really that demanding of the hardware? This system runs for days with big compile jobs and SETI pushing the CPUs at 100%. It's never had an hardware related error, much less a crash. I've heard that pulling all of my PCI cards during Windows setup may help, but that seems a little excessive to me. Anyone else have any insights?

[nrobison]

There's no good reason to remove expansion cards...Win2k is smart enough to find functional drivers for them during install unless they're really obscure. It sounds like your new HDD may be non-bootable (Win would detect this before beginning write install, and conceivably would hide under a rock as you've described) : re-format it using fdisk (bootable floppy) and make sure its set to master and is the only drive in the machine when loading the Win2k CD?

My Win2k Tiger has been flawless - it's on a Seagate HDD led by an Adaptec (I know, I know)LVD SCSI.

[cRock]

Okay, I pulled PCI cards to no avail. Then I pulled a dimm. At that point, the board failed to post. I put the dimm back in, still no post. I cleared the CMOS and it finally posted. Not only that, Win 2k decided to install without a hitch.

She is truly a strange beast.