M6805 does not support XP Pro??!!!

Hi,

My M6805 is crashing repeatedly with XP Pro. Seems it does not like the Service Pack 1 in particular. even though I use all the drivers from emachine CD itself. Anyone else having this problem. Just saw another thread here where someone had same problem with M6809. I just called Emachine customer service and they are saying that they cannot support XP Pro and the laptop will only work with XP Home....can you believe it??

 

I don't really believe that M6805 does not support XP Pro. I am sure many people has upgraded to XP Pro from the preinstalled XP Home. However, I formatted the windows partion in FAT32 rather than NTFS. can that be an issue?

 

That's really hard to believe, but maybe it has something to do with the AMD chip rather than the notebook in particular...that would truly suck if the 64-bit chips don't play ball with Windows XP Pro, and I don't know why that would be the case.

 

pdasg,

I upgraded to XP pro and it has never given me any problems after I got the video card working. I doubt that fat32 is causing any problems. I have partitioned my drive and I have a fat32 partition. It's the "D:" drive though. C drive is still NTFS. Many people do a clean install, meaning they format the drive and install xp pro. I did an upgrade. I put the xp pro cd in the drive while xp home was running and then ran the installation. This allowed me to keep the software that came pre bundled w/the machine. So I still have powerdvd and the CD burning software, etc.... One thing I had to do special was to install the via 4in1 chipset drivers and also the ATI drivers were a pain to get installed. I've been running xp pro for a month now without any problems at all.

emachines m6805

 

Thank you abaxter and dada1 for your responses. At this point it does seem that Fat32 partition was the culprit after all. The reason I am saying this is:

1. At first all three partitions in the hard-drive (one for windows, and two for data files) was in Fat32. And windows crashed every hours (sometimes every half an hour).

2. Then I changed ONLY the windows partition to NTFS. Now it was much more stable. However, it crashed again when I tried to open a number of files (from data partitions that were still fat32) at the same time. In one occassion, Windows crashed when I tried instal one software from the data partition.

3. So, I changed the data partitions to NTFS too. Guess what..... No Crashing. BUT THEN.... I tried to transfer about 30GB of data from an external hard drive to the laptop. And while the transfer was going on, it crashed within 5 minutes. I tried 3 times... same result. Then I realized that the external drive was formatted in Fat32. So I grabbed another external hard drive that was in NTFS, connected both to a desktop (running XP Pro) to transfer all the data from Fat32 drive to NTFS drive, and used this new drive to transfer the data to my laptop.... NO CRASHING [ ][ ][ ] No problem....

Just one note: All my drivers are totally up-to-date...

Of course, its still a litle premature to say anything conclusive. I guess I will keep the laptop under watch for about a week and let you know....

 

That's really weird... I have a fat32 drive and no problem. I also have an external usb 2.0 hard drive with 2 partitions that are fat32 with no problem. I thought that popped into my mind is bad memory. You might want to test your memory. You shouldn't get crashes just because of a different file system.

emachines m6805

 

Yeah..it sounnds weird to me too that two file systems giving me problems. However, I have not had a crash in last 2 days or so after I converted everything into NTFS, which is realy good considering my experience in recent times. Is there a way to test the memory? Is there any software available that detects a bad memory? Actually, when the crashes started happening, I called tech support and that guy suspected a memory problem and so I sent the machine back for servicing. However, when it came back, I did not see any improvement. So, I called them again and learnt that they never encountered a crash with their XP Home installed (the laptop came back with that pre-installed XP Home and I immediately changed to Xp pro). Further, I was told that they cannot promise proper functioning if I install any OS other than that was pre-loaded in the factory, and I was advised to install Xp Home from my restore CD and see if I still get the crashes. Probably I would do that now just to satisfy them. In the meantime, if anyone could tell me a way to check the memory that will be really helpful...

 

Just for an update....after running without problem, my M6805 crashed again yesterday. So, my Fat32 theory was WRONG!!!!.. well, many of you had figured that out anyway..[ ].