Why does Windows 2000 halt with a 0x0000001E exception error on install?

John Savill

January 21, 2001

1 Min Read
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A. If your computer has a mainboard with a VIA MVP3 chipset and an ATA/100 hard disk, Win2K might halt with the exception error you mention. Generally, these mainboards don't support the UDMA 100 rate that the ATA/100-compliant disk requires (these systems usually support UDMA 33 or UDMA 33/66). Apparently the drives don't report backward compatibility properly, and because the Win2K install process is so hardware intensive, the system hangs at this point.

The solution seems to be one of the following:

  • Upgrade your BIOS, if doing so will give you the ATA/100 (UDMA 100) support.



  • Make the following changes to your BIOS:

    1. Go into your BIOS and disable UDMA on the IDE channel that holds your hard drive.

    2. Still in the BIOS, set your programmed input/output (PIO) to Mode 4 instead of auto.

    3. Install Win2K. The installation should proceed with no problems.

    4. Restore the two BIOS changes from steps 1 and 2 to what they were before and see whether Win2K is still stable.

    5. If Win2K isn't stable, you'll probably need to keep the two BIOS changes as long as you use that drive.


  • Use the drive on a board that is ATA/100-compliant.

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