Thinkpads Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm a little bummed out, because I just got a TP 570e which I thought was a really nice machine. It came with a 6GB Toshiba HDD and WinME installed on it, and this install seems to work fine as far as I can tell. It boots and works, but I haven't tested it very much at all.

What bothers me is that I can't seem to install W2K, no matter how many different ways I try:

All these fail in basically the same fashion:

- Boot from W2K install CD

- Copy i386 folder to HDD, boot Win98 floppy, and run winnt.exe

- Take a 20GB HDD with working W2K install from TP560Z, put it into the 570e, and boot the 570e

The failure mechanisms is that at some point a BSOD appears with the ominous message that hal.dll has crashed:

*** STOP: 0x0000001E (0xC0000005 .... )
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

*** Address 803A7D8F base at 803A4000, DateStamp 381f8c6e - hal.dll



- If I try a fresh W2K install from CD, this message appears after all essential files have been loaded from CD ("Setup is loading files") and right after hal.dll is exwecuted for the first time ("Setup is starting Windows 2000").

- If I try to run setup from i386, the same message appears after files have been copied to the HDD, and again right after it says ("Setup is starting Windows 2000").

- If I boot the working HDD from the other laptop, I see the black W2K boot progress screen, then part of the colored W2K boot progress screen, and then again the BSOD with hal.dll. Booting this HDD in safe mode or with boot logging enabled also didn't help anything.

Please give me advice on the likelyhood of the following causes:

- Memory?
Could this be a faulty memory? I tried to remove the 128MB upgrade memory stick, but it didn't improve the situation. What if it is the 64MB on-board memory that is faulty? Am I out of luck then? Also, I ran Memtest86 for one full loop, with no faults.

- Driver issue?
Could this be remedied by hitting F6 during the install and loading some special driver for Windows 2000? For example, maybe W2K doesn't recognize the TP's IDE controller correctly. Or, as I read on this page under "Support for AGP displays" (http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... WIK-42SHRN), maybe I need to add some AGP display driver for setup to work? Also, I hit F5 and tried to influence the choice of HAL loaded - for example, if I select "standard PC", then I see a slightly different error message on the BSOD: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

- Bios corruption?
I flashed my BIOS to an older version and the newest one again, but it didn't help. But what keeps puzzling me about my BIOS is that, for example, the F12 key doesn't ever seem to show a list of boot devices, even if I set this option to enabled in the bios setup. I thought hitting F12 after you turn on the 570e should show a list of bootable devices... instead, my 570e always goes to the first bootable device according to the boot priority as selected in the bios setup, but it *NEVER* showed any boot menu in response to F12.

- Mobo fault?
Lastly, could this be a faulty mainboard? I don't have any way to test or prove this, the IBM diagnostic Floppy didn't reveal any issues either, but who knows...


Any help would be greatly appreciated!! Otherwise I might have a 570e for sale next week again - somehow my 560z with the nicely working W2K install doesn't seem so bad after all, and once I give it the new fast 60GB HDD that I had reserved for the 570e, it should be a breeze...

The Thinkpad 570E doesn't need any special drivers. I mean, it does for stuff like OSD and such, but for basic functionality, Win2K doesn't need any textmode drivers during install. Try memtest -- http://www.memtest86.com/ -- you can boot if off a floppy and that'll answer your memory questions.

It sounds to me like you've got a bad or damaged copy of Windows 2000. Do you have access to different install media?

You can also try booting a Linux CD like Knoppix. It won't touch your hard drive and will try to get your hardware working. (But if your hard drive is corrupt, you may wish to leave it out while you try the CD.)