Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 - cannot install 64bit O/S?!

rjsdavis

Honorable
Mar 13, 2012
14
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10,510
Hello to all

I am just helping my son to build his first custom PC, prior to now, it's all been retail desktop and laptop units in the family. It's been a struggle to actually get the system to turn on and boot up, but with some diligence, we got everything working. However, we've got one last problem.

The system is based on a Gigabyte MoBo (as per the title), and with an AMD FX 6 core processor. The problem is that we can't get a single 64 bit o/s to install on this system to make use of the 8Gb of installed ram.

The computer works just fine. No issues, no BSOD's, and will happily install and run any 32bit Windows o/s you care to ask it to install and run. With a 32bit o/s disc in the DVD drive, it will boot from the drive just fine, and install a new o/s if you ask it to.

However, it will not boot from an x64 o/s disc at all - when you get to the boot screen option where it asks if you'd like to boot from the CD/DVD, no matter what you do, it ignores your keyboard requests and simply boots into the Windows that's already installed. We've tried removing the existing o/s's and trying to boot from fresh, for a clean fresh install from the DVD, and again, it won't boot from the DVD drive until a x86 o/s disc is in the drawer. It's bizarre.

Likewise, if you try to start an x64 o/s install/upgrade from within any running 32bit o/s - it simply throws up the immediate message indicating that the software is "incompatible" with your system, and it won't even try or start to install the x64 o/s.

Therefore, I conclude that some sort of hardware problem, or incompatibility is stopping the x64 from being installed.

We've been in contact with Gigabyte for support, but all we've got from them is a rather unhelpful "we can't replicate the issue" response. I've been searching in other forums and threads, and have tried changing the CD/DVD type from IDE (which it was at default in the BIOS settings) to ACHI, (the only other option was RAID which seemed to be no good to us), and this made no difference in terms of trying to get the computer to actually boot from an x64 o/s. We've also made sure that EFI has been selected rather than non-EFI or Auto in the BIOS settings also - again, it made no difference.

I've now got to the limit of my knowledge and experience, and can't diagnose it any further. Is there anyone on here that can help us to work out what's stopping us from being to install an x64 o/s? Most annoyingly, when you look in the System settings within the computer when it's running - it reports itself as a 64 bit system, running a 32 bit o/s!!

The purpose is primarily to ensure that all of the RAM can be used, rather than having half of it go missing due to 32 bit o/s limitations.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions or diagnosis help!
 


Hello Calvin

Many thanks for the reply - I'm actually referring to Win 7 and Win 10 - it was the same result with both...

How do I add one the latest versions of the SATA driver to the beginning of the installation? I'm no expert, but I don't understand why this would affect the x64 installations, but not the x86 installations - as surely neither would have the latest versions of the SATA driver?

Thanks for helping me to understand this - really appreciated.