Southern Utah Technology & Design Computer Consultants

This last week we had a client running a server on Windows 2000 that began expiriencing hardware issues.  Don’t everybody gasp at once.  I know that it is quite shocking that a Windows 2k machine could possibly be getting a little old and have hardware issues.

The motherboard was well on her way to giving up the ghost and one of the first symptoms was data coruption.  After a test using quicktec, we discovered that one of the RAM banks had failed and was no longer functioning.  Our initial thought which is actually laughable now was to try and find a replacement board that matched the existing motherboard. That of course was fruitless considering in computer years the hardware in this machine is easily 800 years old.

We opted then to go the upgrade route.  We weren’t too certain how Windows would react to a shiny new Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a new board and ram.  Not too much to our surprise the first attempt at booting after the new hardware was installed resulted in the infamous Blue Screen of Death.  It did manage to get a couple of devices installed before the BSOD.  At this point we opted for Safe Mode.

Safe Mode gave us much better results.  The remaining hardware that could be detected (IDE bus, SATA devices, USB, and other generic drivers) installed well but we couldn’t get the mother board driver disk utility to run.  We ended up having to install the Radeon video card drivers manually and then boot into normal mode and the rest of the drivers were able to be installed.

I almost forgot to mention that we couldn’t get the mother board driver disk to run because we didn’t notice the tiny DVD logo on the disk and of course this dinosoar of a machine didn’t have a DVD drive.  External USB drive to the rescue.  Which again worked remarkably well considering the OS.  At least this machine was running SP4.

So the moral of the story is if you have  a few hours to kill and a lot of patience, you can successfully upgrade the hardware of  a Win2K machine. Of course don’t forget to backup your data first.