W2K BSOD at boot

I just installed W2K on an existing Win98 machine like this:
c =Win98 drive 0 (FAT32)
d= W2K drive 1 (NTFS)

There are other partitions on both drives but they are not a problem. After I installed W2K, which went very smooth, I was able to boot into W2K without a problem however once I started adding the various drivers for modem, scanner, display adapter, sound blaster, etc., I now cannot boot into W2K without this BSOD reading;

Stop: 0x0000001E (0xC0000005, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

From all the research I've done it should be a driver problem or a hardware problem but if it booted successfully with the same hardware before adding drivers then I assume it must be driver(s).

All the sites and Microsoft KB, suggest that if it's a driver then it should have a reference to it at the end of the above statement but I have nothing but the bolded statement above and then the standard explanation that somethings wrong, blah blah.

Also curious is the "C" in the first parameter. I can't find a reference to it or what it stands for.

OK, here's what I did. I used safe mode (yes, it boots to safe mode just fine) and deleted all the software I installed; nvidia drivers, sound blaster drivers, modem drivers, scanmaker software & drivers (USB) and NIC drivers. That's everything. No apps were added at all before the problem.

I uninstalled (safe mode) the Audio, modem, NIC, ports, display adapter (back to VGA) and scanner.

I was able to dial out after the first setup and download SP3 from MS so the modem worked fine, the display was fine and everything seemed just great. Then I rebooted. Bummer. After all that I still get the same BSOD with the same message.

Sorry for the length here but you all know the more the better. Any ideas folks ???

Home built clean, 1Ghz Athlon, 512 MB, partition D is 5GB's, ASUS A7Ve, eVGA Nvidia MX400, HSP Micromodem (I know but it worked fine and has for a long while with my Win98 install) DVD/CD and CD-RW and Viewsonic 19".

Let me know if you need any other info. By the way I tried a repair from the install CD and it found WINNT on the wrong partition "H" which is the other partition on that drive, but it ran through the repair and said it was successful but it was no help.

:mad:

Maybe you have some hardware malfunctioning (like your video card)?

You could also try restoring the orignal registry from d:\winnt\repair. I have had to do that once or twice via recovery console. Just boot into the console and copy the files over the real ones in d:\winn\system32\config.

Thanks ottr, I'm so used to Win98 and scanreg /restore and just learning the tricks of W2K I wasn't sure how to restore the registry. When you say boot into console I assume you mean from the repair option or do you mean F8 and one of the options such as safe mode with command prompt?

As far as hardware, all of the hardware works 100% in the Win98 OS and worked 100% until I started installing drivers.

You can boot off of either the Windows setup floppy disks or the Windows CD... press R to repair and then press C to start the recovery console (I think). It will ask you for the admin password.

You should be able to find some good recovery console references out there. Better than I can provide anyway...

In the future you can backup the system state with ntbackup. That will grab your registry and all your system files... lots easier to restore from ntbackup.

Well, no luck in discovering the exact cause this weekend so I re-installed W2K completely and very carefully walked through each plug 'n' pray and each non-plug 'n' pray piece of hardware.

The only thing I found as a possible was the Creative SoundBlaster PCI128 card and it's specific drivers. The card is listed as one of the few that is MS W2K acceptable but once completed the machine took a long time to shutdown on every attempt while rebooting and I got no sound. However there was no indication of a fault in device manager and there were no resource conflicts.

After a bit of this and that I determined that I wasn't going to get it to work and I didn't like the time W2K was taking to shutdown so I uninstalled the SB drivers and installed drivers for the SB generic AudioPCI and it worked instantly and no more lag in the shutdown sequence.

I was confidant enough to begin installing Office and other software and all is well. A good solid dual boot is now mine.

Hhhmmmmm.

Maybe this will help future installers with they're W2K or other OS setups. Think Sound Blaster.

Thanks ottr for your input.