A8N-SLI Deluxe & SATA Win XP Install Problems

[onesaint]

Hello all,

ive got a A8N-SLI Deluxe that ive been running XP Pro on a 200 gig wd ide drive. Recently needed to make that storage so i purchased a WD740GD raptor. there was only about 30 gigs used on the 200 gig drive so i ghosted the drive to the new sata 74 gig. removed the 200 gig and rebooted. Then I got the fatal and constant "Error Loadingzx Operating System" message. ive tried many combinations of things now as well as upgrading the A8n bios to 1006 and trying to make the sata a raid drive on the NV sata controller.

i have not used the Silicon Image 3114R and it is disabled in the bios. ive tried to install xp then go back and repair as well as go through the recovery consol and fix the mrb with fixboot and fixmbr. Nothing seems to work. i brought the drive into my office and hooked it up to my bosses computer and was able to both format and use the drive as an additional drive on his computer. it just isn’t working as the boot drive.

any help is really really appreciated as i am at a loss for ideas. TYIA!!!


GA-7NNXP, XP3000+ Barton
1 gig corsair pc2700, 2 Maxtor 80GB SATA 150
1 Seagate 160 gig ATA 133,
Asus GeForce4 TI4800, Samsung 172X
D. VINE 4 Chassis (moded)

 

[Crashman]

Make sure RAID mode is disabled for the nVidia RAID controller, and that the drive the controller sees is listed in the boot order.

Lots of people have problems with Ghost and XP.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[apesoccer]

Idea 1:
I'd try it on the other controller. I would also update to the latest bios, from what i understood, the bios on both of the sata chips is updated with the bios update. You may want to double check that however.

2:
As to ghosting, what version of ghost are you using. Older versions of symantec ghost ent(pre 7.5 i think) have problems with XP if you are using ntfs.

3:
Have you tried installing XP on to the hd manually? You'll need a diskette with the drivers for the sata (or wait...i don't think i did for my 36gb raptor and a8n-sli, bleh i can't remember).

General Comments
Regardless make sure raid is off for both chips (I have the sata controller i'm not using turned off in the bios, as i see you do as well). I think you already had that set correctly though since you made it to windows before it crashed. Is it a bluescreen that comes up, or something else? Is your 200gb drive disconnected when you attempt to boot? Mark sure the raptor is set to the same drive letter as was your 200gb drive.

Current machines running F@H:
AMD: [64 3500+][64 3000+][2500+][2000+][1.3x1][366]
Intel: [X 3.0x3][P4 3.0x2][P4 2.4x5][P4 1.4]

"...and i'm not gay" RX8 -Greatest Quote of ALL Time<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by apesoccer on 03/30/05 12:23 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[onesaint]

thanks both Crashman and apesoccer for the replies! thanks to another post, i realized that while the machine was in post that the drive was being seen as CHS and not LBA. i think this was due to ghosting it (using ghost 9). so i wrote 0s using the WD dos utility cd off thier web site. booted back up and was able to do a clean install.

now that the drive has XP and is running im having another problem. i have formatted the 200gb drive but it seems the bios isnt enabling the sata drive to be first hdd to boot from. no matter what i do in the bios. i have the first hdd drive set to the raptor but every time i boot i have to hit f8 to select the raptor as the boot drive and it sees the 200gb as the first drive to boot from. any ideas?

again thanks for the help!


GA-7NNXP, XP3000+ Barton
1 gig corsair pc2700, 2 Maxtor 80GB SATA 150
1 Seagate 160 gig ATA 133,
Asus GeForce4 TI4800, Samsung 172X
D. VINE 4 Chassis (moded)

 

[apesoccer]

Uh...I did run in to that happening, but i found a quick fix for it...i don't remember what it was. Heh. I have the 36 raptor and 2x40 in raid 1 on my a8n-sli d. It was a boot issue in the bios for me.

<starts looking through 300pg manual...>

Yea...uh good luck. I may have turned off the option to look for a boot device from Hard Drive or something odd like that...

Current machines running F@H:
AMD: [64 3500+][64 3000+][2500+][2000+][1.3x1][366]
Intel: [X 3.0x3][P4 3.0x2][P4 2.4x5][P4 1.4]

"...and i'm not gay" RX8 -Greatest Quote of ALL Time

 

[onesaint]

meaning in the boot sequince you just put cd and thats it? or where do i find that option?

A8N-SLI Deluxe, AMD64 3500+
1 gig corsair XMS Pro pc3200,1 WD740 raptor os drive 1 WD2000JB , EVGA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E, Samsung 172X

 

[onesaint]

i got it! i made boot device 2 & 3 in the bios both hdd, (boot device 1 is cdrom) then set the sata first and the pata last (same set up as before) and the bios loaded the sata first! cool. thanks for the ideas and help!

A8N-SLI Deluxe, AMD64 3500+
1 gig corsair XMS Pro pc3200,1 WD740 raptor os drive 1 WD2000JB , EVGA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E, Samsung 172X