trouble loading XP Home

Well, gotta say I have no idea what that means.

 

So I spoke to an Asus tech and he seems to think that the SATA drivers should be built into Windows with Service Pack 2.

Further, now I can't even get to the initial Windows installation screen. I'm very much thinking I have a dud motherboard as the best I get are beeps and a occasional trip to the BIOS screen.

I did see one message claiming that "overclock failed" no idea what's going on anymore, seems like it's going from bad to worse.

 

Well, I'm back to where I was before, which is a good thing. I must have boot the boot schedule back to floppy, hd, dvd a couple days ago. I re-ordered things to dvd, floppy, hd and the dvd drive is back in action and attempting to load.

The best I 've gotten so far is where I was actually able to press F8 and accept the Windows license, then, for half a second, I did see the hard drive format set-up screen. Alas, it was short lived since after that brief view of the format screen "poof" we're back into reboot and off again.

...of course, I've yet to find any kind of SATA driver anywhere I've looked.

 

Here's a link indicating that Windows XP w/SP2 does NOT have SATA built into the driver set, clearly contridicting what the ASUS technician told me over the phone today.

http://www.mysuperpc.com/build/pc_sata_install_windows_operating_system.shtml

 

For what its worth, you can make floppies for both the first and third options and load both at the F6 prompt. You'll have to hit S twice but Windows XP will come back later in the file copy process and tell you which one it really wants for your controller. And, if it wants both - it will tell you that too.

usasma - jumpers aren't an anomoly on SATA drives but jumpers for master slave designations are. One header = one drive. Some manufacturers require jumpering SATAII drives to run at SATA 150.

 

Rockster2U - part of my struggle here is a just can't find any SATA drivers and am getting all sorts of conflicting views on whether they're in fact necessary. There are no such drivers on the CD disk or the Asus site or the hard-drive manufacturer site

I spent some time with Asus tech this morning and went through a number of things including clearing CMOS. Based on the fact that the system is constantly rebooting regardless of whether or not the Windows set-up screen goes active or not the tech did seem to agree that there is likely a hardware issue going on here, which in this case is likely a motherboard related issue.

It's admitadley very strange... but we were both out of ideas.

I'm going to call Newegg and see if I can exchange the board, which I suspect they'll do without to much fuss.

I'd like to ask though if anyone in general thinks it would be worth it to spend about $30 bucks extra and move to the 965 chipset. The reason for this is I read a review on the Asus P5L that mentioned that the ICH7 chipset does not support SATA 3.0 and NCQ but that ICH7M/ICH7R does support it. Though this directly conflicts the build descriptions of some other users who claim to have built on SATA 3G hard drives (no mention of drivers).

I am frankly AMAZED at the general level of confusion surrounding SATA and SATA drivers. One would thinks that someone within Asus would know what was going on and included such drives on the enclosed CD, but nothing is indicated with the possible exception of "Make ITE8211 32/64bit IDE Driver Disk" but I honestly don't know what this means. Maybe I'll call Asus again and ask, but like I wrote previously, they seem to think it's unneccesary under Service pack 2 installations.

Actually, I will say, at the minimum, the Asus tech support number has been responsive and they do try to be helpfull.

 

Tom

You found the right spot - Chapter 3 section 3.2.4 of your manual titled Make Disk. The first option is for your SATA drivers (assuming a 32 bit XP install) and the third option is for your IDE drivers. You will need two floppies. Just run each utility from the CD with a floppy in a floppy drive. I think thats what I said a few days ago - same advice still applies.

As to your SATA 3.0 vs 1.5 - The manual says the board will run either. So does the ASUS web site - big bold plain ENGLISH. (Chinese versions are available for download if that would help).

 

Well, for anyone still remotely interested, I went ahead and replaced the motherboard to the Asus P5L-VM (a small step up from the previous). Put it all together nice and neat.

Went into BIOS - changed the time, checked for connectivity, etc...all the good stuff. Like before everything checked out. Even reset boot priority to start with the DVD drive.

Put in Windows Home CD, turned off computer; turned it on. Well, NOTHING at all now, no DVD drive spinning, no random reboots, no getting to Windows install, hereing the thing beep and restart. NOTHING at all this time.

Computers are just ALOT of fun

Corrupt PSU? Bad HD? Bad DVD? Memory? I feel like a card dealer "pick a card, any card "

Incidentally, the PSU is a 360 watt (400 max) PC PowerAndCooling with a 21A 12V rail. The board calls for 350 watts with a 15A 12V rail, so I think I'm at least okay here.

 

SCRATCH THE LAST ONE!!!! THE DRIVE IS STARTING TO FORMAT

I went ahead and start with a 40Gb partition on a 160Gb drive, so far so good and we're at 26% NTFS as I type. Specifically, the first partition is 40963Mb out of 152626 total

Hoping everything goes well.. and that formatting the rest of the drive will not be problematic.

 

Eh...well, so close yet so far. Now I'm gett the following after a reboot

Press any key to boot from CD
ITLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

The last of which I did, but it just gives the same message.

I'm kinda afraid to power down completely....

 

All right, just got off the phone with Asus and the guy I spoke to seems to think it was due to legacy writes of driver files from previous failed attempts.

So this time I'm going the none-fancy-pants route and formatting the full drive with slow NTFS. I can always have my friend use Partition Magic later on.

This is gonna take a while...hoping the full format will do the trick.

 

...tell you what though, it sure is moving fast, I'm a 15% already.

I build an Intel system with a friend of mine (no longer in contact) and I remember things taking quite a while.

A bit subjective I know, or maybe drives run that much quicker these days.

Incidentally, if I CAN'T load Windows even after a full format...well I may just take a sledgehammer to the thing.... Okay, I'm kidding.. I think.

 

So close yet so far, thought we had a winner.

Got through a full hard drive, full NTFS format to the whole drive. Windows then started loading set up files, the poof, a beep and a reboot and back to the "TLDR is missing" black screen from before.

Tried loading from the hard drive via F8 and still nothing.

I'd say bad hard drive, but wouldn't a bad hard drive be unable to format?

Still, good or bad, it leaves me back to the same thing.

Oh, and I did look for SATA drivers on the enclosed Asus disc and this one, onlike the P5L - MX has absolutely nothing even remotely resembling said drivers. Plus I wouldn't think the drive would format if it had driver problems. And I've discussed the driver issue with Asus and there convinced that it's they are part of Windows theses days.

 

So I did another restart and got through the intial stages of installation where the initial files are load into the system (RAM maybe?). Then I got past the "press Enter to install Windows" selection and past F8 to accept the license.

Then I could see that the drive was fully formated with only 8mb residual (I believe this is common).

Now I'm at the next screen. At this bottom of this screen there are three options
NTFS quick
NTFS
"Leave the current file system intact (no changes).

Maybe I should keep going, but haven't pressed any keys. I'm frankly worried that even if I'm lucky enough to install, I'll have a corrupted "twin" version of certain setup files on the drive. Maybe I'm being overly cautious.

I'm also thinking of running up to the local WalMart and buying a new drive, but not yet I think.

 

I hit enter and now I see

CAUTION: A\ WINDOWS folder already exists that may contain a Windows installation. If you continue, the existing Windows installation may be overwritten.

To use the folder and delete the existing Windows installation in it, press L

To use a different folder press ESC

To quit Setup, press F3

....I wonder if I should press L.