Faulty win2k installation and Setup reboot cycle

[bobo]

Thought I better start again as I began my last thread with incorrect and misleading suppositions.

I upgraded my dad's celeron 667 system from win 98 SE to Win2k Professional. It got through the installation okay but began to crash with a blue screen of frozen vertical colour bars when I tried to install his Sympatico DSL software; I don't know if that is what precipitated the problem, however, or just when it began to show up, since it has done the same at several points after startup.

The monitor is not the problem - I hooked up our old one and it did the same.

So, I tried to reinstall Win2k but it could not get through the installation without crashing. To reboot I have to literally flip the rear power switch off and on and press the startup button again. It goes into the "restarting setup" routine and goes through the full installation (analysing the system, installing files, registering components) until about 1/4 of the way through the "saving settings" portion when it crashes again.

I have tried resetting the BIOS defaults, booting to safe mode, safe vga mode, last good configuration - it makes no difference - it continues to restart setup and hit the same roadblock. Any ideas on how to get past this?

[degsy]

try removing non-essential hardware such as soundcard, network card etc.
Try installing with only a basic pc setup.

[bobo]

How about the win2k boot disks? Should I try to get in through them?

[bobo]

I used win2kpro boot disks and got through the system repair okay so I am out of the reboot syndrome. However, it still crashes with the vertical bar freeze up anywhere from 2 seconds to 5 minutes after booting up and logging in.

There's not much extra stuff on the computer. It's not in front of me now (my dad's computer) but I think it just has a 56k modem - everything else is onboard, I think. I'll try that, anyway.

My best guess is the wrong video driver. It's several months ago now, but I think when I got a vga default display I went online and picked a driver from a list with no certainty it was the exactly correct one (NVidia). If this is the case, can I uninstall it and reboot to a default driver (assuming I can keep the video long enough)?

Could another possibility be a lack of sp4 and other win2k upgrades? - I only got as far as the basic installation from disk when I encountered the problems.

[degsy]

If you can get into SafeMode the you can try uninstalling the Graphics Driver or the Device.

It should then load the default.
You would then have to find and load the correct driver.