This is giving me a massive headache.....HELP!

olin · Dec 12, 2006

I have been trying for several days to install the workstation software on a winXP box. I have seen so many blue screens lately that I cringe everytime I see anything at all that's blue. Seriously, I know I have installed this well over 100 times with numerous restores of my C drive during the same period. Thank goodness for sector backups.

Every time I install I get a blue screen. The codes range from 7e, 8e, 50, etc. Sometimes it indicates PVSNET.Sys is the problem but usually it doesn't display any. Also the installation is missing some files. e.g. there are 15 items in the parallels folder. The one time that I got it to go all the way to the end of the install (although it didn't work) it had 20 items. The missing files are a couple of vmtools files, and a couple of citrix files. I'm not sure what else. Sometimes the installation will get past the "Installing network driver" and other times it doesn't. And, sometimes after the bluescreen and then reboot I see a reference to the parallels dhcp service, sometimes not. I have even tried doing a "clean boot" to get past the install. I tried both the selective boot and the diagnostic boot. I'm stumped! Please take a look at my system specs and tell me if there is anything obvious and tell me where I go from here.

System Specs are:

Thermaltake Xaser III V1000A Black Performance Tower
w/7 adjustable case fans and dual LCD temp display

Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 Athlon 939 64-64FX - F13 BIOS
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53(939)
1GB(2 x 512) Corsair XMS Xtreme Low Latency w/LED Display(2-2-2-5)
(RAM is running at more stable settings)

HIS ATI Radeon X850XT IceQ Turbo - AGP
SamSung Syncmaster 955df Monitor

Creative X-FI Extreme Music

Western Digital 250GB SATA 8 MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500JD)
Hitachi HD 400GB SATA 7200
Seagate 400GB SATA 7200
Seagate 200GB USB Firewire EXTERNAL

LG DVD-ROM
NEC 8X DVD+-RW ND-2500A/GBP w/Herrie FW
Logitech G5 Laser Mouse
Antec True550 Power Supply w/Gold Plated Connectors
Logitech 680 5.1 Speaker System

tgrogan · Dec 12, 2006

olin, don't know for sure, but you might investigate using an AMD64. I haven't tried mine, but I don't think it's worth debugging myself. Maybe later....

olin · Dec 12, 2006

I am not using the 64bit OS. I am just using the standard 32bit Windows XP SP2 - Just for kicks I installed it on an old dell box I have just to see if it would install and it did. However that really is just an old throwaway system. Does anyone have it installed on an AMD FX series system?

tgrogan · Dec 13, 2006

olin said:
I am not using the 64bit OS. I am just using the standard 32bit Windows XP SP2 - Just for kicks I installed it on an old dell box I have just to see if it would install and it did. However that really is just an old throwaway system. Does anyone have it installed on an AMD FX series system?

I knew that you were using a 32 bit OS, obviously since XP is not a 32bit OS. I was just hinting that since 64bit is not supported, there may be some problems. I keep a decent 32bit system around just for this purpose. Some times the bleeding edge is painful. ;>)

olin · Dec 14, 2006

tgrogan said:
I knew that you were using a 32 bit OS, obviously since XP is not a 32bit OS. I was just hinting that since 64bit is not supported, there may be some problems. I keep a decent 32bit system around just for this purpose. Some times the bleeding edge is painful. ;>)

Well, I am a little confused as to your meaning. Also I bought this system on 7/12/2004. Back then it WAS a bleeding edge system for certain and it will be the LAST time I buy such a new system. I had nothing but problems for several months until the BIOS finally caught up.

But, in any case, "I FIXED IT !!" YEE-HAAAHHHHHH - I finally forced myself to do a "re-install in place" of XP. As soon as I finished the inplace XP upgrade I made a backup of my system and then installed Parallels without any problems. Of course I now have to go through each program making sure it still works and I have to install about 70 windows updates but who cares? I hope this will fix a couple of other strange issues I've been having too. Should have done this some time ago.

Now on to playing with the software. Later.........

tgrogan · Dec 14, 2006

Congrats! I was lucky to already want to install the same OS that was well-known at supporting 64 bit. There's a lot of confusion out there, and a lot of bad choices available when configuring. Wait til you see what to do with Java! ;>)

olin · Dec 14, 2006

Well a little bit of bad news. The version that I installed was 2.2 build 2092. I installed this version because it had actually gotten further than any other during all the crashes. Anyway, I went to install the latest version and just as before I blue screened. So, I then restored my system to the same state it was in when I successfully installed 2092. It still blue-screened. I may have learned something that can help though. That is, when installing the 2112 I hit cancel so I could see the unsigned drivers it wanted to install. It got to the network driver and seemed to install ok. Then, just a moment later it displayed another unsigned driver window but there was no driver name! Nothing! Just the text warning you about this and that. Just a few seconds after that appeared while I was reading it and before pressing any buttons I got a Stop 8E blue screen. So I've gone back to 2092 which works fine. Hope this info is of use to someone.