My first time! i'm scared. tell me what you think...

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JTBALLER

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Aug 18, 2009
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APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: would like to buy the parts today BUDGET RANGE: would be happy to keep it under 1,000. but 1,200 would still be fine.

SYSTEM USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: gaming, internet, hdmi port for movies

PARTS NOT REQUIRED: have keyboard and mouse, that's about it

PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: newegg or any other sites that are respected

PARTS PREFERENCES: i want to use the intel core i7 920, because i've read that it's very good.

OVERCLOCKING: don't know much about overclocking so not right now

MONITOR RESOLUTION:1920x1200 i believe

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: nothing right now...

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Parts I've picked out: well i've only ended up coming up with a CPU i guess right now as i'm not too knowledgeable about videocards, soooo....

Intel core i7 920

picked this case, because i thought it was cool

I wanted to have an HDMI port also, so for that I would need to have a motherboard that has one, right? and then also for that HDMI, do I have to look for a videocard that can support HDMI?

well, for the motherboard and the videocard, i'd love to have suggestions from you guys, because I don't know which cards are good and which are not, and what is the best for the price, etc.

well, i guess this is a start... any opinions?
 
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Although a flash may not correct the problem, seeing on how it isn't mentioned. Have you attempted to see if Windows 7 will now recognize the 1tb drive to install on now that it has been properly formatted?
 
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yep, i tried it again and it gave me the error message from before 🙁

but when i was in windows 7 i was able to use the drive. like i could save things to it.

so i don't know. if the drive is fine, i guess it has to be motherboard that is causing it right?

i'll have to look into flash bios...
 
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It looks like the motherboard is the cause Jtballer. 🙁

The same error as before as in it doesn't see the drive?

It's not playing nice with 1tb+ drives as the boot drive. Another thought I had, are you planning on partitioning the drive? Perhaps you could partition it in Windows then try again, it may work it may not. Might be worth a try if you're uncomfortable flashing.

If you're going to flash through Windows, make sure you disable all background programs, antivirus, etc. If something interrupts the flash it could brick it and if you're power goes out, your goose is cooked.
 
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well it's saying to try again when i get the resources or whatever and with the error code as i posted before.

this sucksssssssssssssss. but anyway, thanks again for your help ominous prime, you are a gentleman and a scholar :)
 
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lol I'm not so sure on either of those accounts Jtballer. But thanks, I'm glad I could help, marginally. We'll get this fixed yet.

I wouldn't be too afraid of flashing through Windows, and partitioning the drive might be worth a try as well.

Just be sure if you flash to check the revision number of the motherboard, as well as the bios version. If it's the latest version there's no need to flash, of course.
 
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Just kind of following along here a little. To jtballer, if your motherboard has an option to save a copy of your current bios to a flash drive or something to that effect, definitely do that. I've got a Gigabyte board that had a bios recovery utility with it, and I backed up my original bios before flashing with an updated one from Gigabyte's own site for my board mind you.

So glad that I did, because when I did the flash, it worked, but I began getting data corruption on my hard drive. I ended up having to flash back to the original bios and run startup repair from my Windows Vista disc, then had to search until I found a bios that worked correctly(I wanted to update to a Phenom 2 and needed a bios update for said upgrade).

But just be warned, have a backup if possible.
 
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Mine might be different, but my gigabyte board you simply booted with a usb drive inserted, went into the bios and proceeded as though you were going to flash the bios, and it gave an option to save the current bios there. Then you could save it, then reflash.
 
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If I read correctly you've got this board correct?

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/BIOS_Model.aspx?ProductID=3103#anchor_os

I would definitely recommend doing the bios backup if possible. Like I said, my board is a Gigabyte, an older AMD board, but their bios revisions seemed a little whacky.

*Edit..if this is your board, look on page 50-51 of your manual, it looks like you can at least backup to your hard drive. So if you can do that, maybe you could also back it up to a flash drive in case something would go bonkers.

*Double edit-Look at page 35 as well, it looks similar to what my bios gives as options, I think I was able to do everything I needed from within the Q-flash utility. But my board is a couple of years old now, so yours may be slightly different, but mine was not too bad.

The other idea, if the flashes don't work, you could partition the drive into sizes less than 1 tb to make it think you have multiple drives. The advantage to doing it this way is you can put any important files or things you know you want to keep on the secondary partition, if you upgrade the OS or want to reinstall for some reason, you can just blow away the main partition and have all your data backed up for when you are up and running again.
 
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i'm going to do the windows one where the utility downloads it for me and does it itself.

so if i backup the current bios, it will let me go back and fix the board if something happens to go wrong while attempting to update? just put the current one on a usb flash drive?
 
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Oops you replied while I was editing.

On mine, I used the bios utility I pointed to in the manual. All I did was put the new bios onto a flash drive after downloading, rebooted into the bios setup, entered Q-flash utility, and it allowed me to backup the original bios. When I needed to go back to the original after having issues, I was able to boot back into the bios with the flash drive in and reflash back to the original copy.

Just make sure you name them so that you can tell them apart. Also note on yours I noticed your bios appears to have a couple more options on the bottom of your main screen that I don't have, so you may need to look into those as well. The windows flash may work, just a little more to go wrong imo.

But what happened with mine, the flashes worked, come in to turn on the pc the next day and got bootup errors. Had to reflash and boot from my Vista Disc to run startup repair which got me up and running, but still. Had to go through a couple of versions before finding one that worked correctly.

On my board however, I think the bios versions they put out were betas and maybe not fully tested. Also, I know some versions caused weird stuff like the Ethernet card to stop working and things like that, so do your homework and don't just assume the latest is best. Had to learn the hard way a few times there.
 
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hey i'm a little swamped right now, but i'm going to come back and read through your posts again, but i think I'm going to try to partition the drive to smaller than 1 TB to see if it will show it in the windows 7 setup.

thanks for the replies!
 
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No problem man. Let us know how it works. If it does not work within the setup, here is another option.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

This little utility is called Partition Wizard. If I'm not mistaken it's what I used a couple of times. The Home Edition is free as well I believe, kinda nice for free. So if you can install on the smaller drive you said you've got, maybe use that to Partition the larger drive, then remove the small drive and boot to setup and hopefully it will see things correctly. Feel free to check in anytime.
 
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I'll keep my fingers crossed that partitioning will work for you. There are advantages to partitioning of course for instance if you ever need to reinstall the OS, you don't have to wipe the entire drive, and you can better organize your data.

Creating a backup of your bios shouldn't be too terribly difficult, but I imagine if the bios update goes completely awry, it will be totally unrecoverable and require a RMA.
 
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So I just flashed the bios with the latest available from the site, and I did it through the bios. Everything went successfully.

So, what I tried next was to start windows 7 setup again and see if the drive would show up, and it didn't.

One thing I've noticed though... If I have the 10gb drive that windows is currently installed on only connected, when I get to the part where I choose if I want to update or do a custom new install, and i click i want to install, it will go to the screen that asks "Where do you want to install windows" and that smaller drive will show up.

Now, If I have that drive AND my drive that I can't get to show up, I will get this message:

Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code:0xE0000100

I also get the message if just the larger drive is connected also. So the 10gb drive alone will show up but both will give the message and so will just the larger drive by itself.

Also, I tried to use something I saw while on my way to setting up windows 7 that was in the reapair my computer area from the windows 7 disc. And in there, I could access the command prompt. So I tried to format the large drive again. I put:

format e: /q

it said that it was UDF file type? and then it asked for the volume label. i don't know what to put here. I tried to type it as it is shown in bios which is something like "WDC wd1001...." and i tried a few different combinations but it kept saying it was wrong.

I was able to format the large drive through windows 7 once and it said it was finished successfully, but then I remember when I was shutting down windows that something popped up that said it did not complete successfully. which was weird because it had been a good while since I had even did the format and then out of no where that message popped up.

But now, I cannot format through windows. It says that the drive is in use, do i want to continue anyway? I say yes, and then it says it can't. and tells me to close anything associated with the drive.

But the startup files and windows 7 is installed on the other smaller drive. Any advice on how to format the drive through windows and get around this message it's giving me?


siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh lol this is frustrating.
 
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hmmmm interesting, i went to disk management and created a new volume on the large drive to see if it would show up during windows 7 setup but it gave me the error message again.

so i went back into the setup recovery again into command prompt to try to toy around with the volume again and this time when i typed in format e: /q, it gave me a different message and said that it will all be deleted, continue?

and i did and format completed.

so now i'm going to try setup ONCE AGAIN and see if it will show up. probably not :)

edit: didn't work, same error message.


Well, lastly, i didn't get this error message before until i put in the windows xp disk and did the format which came up as an error after 3 hours. Before then, I was able to at least get to the "Where do you want to install windows" screen even though the drive wouldn't show up. But now when I click to get there I get that error message.


ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh what a mess lol.

edit: here is the drive i have:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284


i think i'll just try to get a refund for this hard drive and just buy a smaller hard drive like maybe 640 gb or something... you think that'd work?
 
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ohiou grad,

so ya think that will show up?

Currently, the IDE drive will show up but when the SATA drive is connected i cannot even now get to the list to choose where i want to install windows, because of the error message.

Should I try a smaller drive and see if it works? i'm wondering if perhaps it could have something to do with sata or ide connection?

edit: because honestly 640 is plenty, and i don't even really care i just want to be able to finish the computer at this point :)
 
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Seems like you've been busy Jtballer. I'd probably try another SATA hard drive before RMA'ing the 1tb WD just in case. But I know there are some problems with Windows 7 and some motherboards not playing nice with boot driver 1tb+

So going for a smaller boot drive should most likely work. Good job on flashing the bios, shame it didn't solve the problem though.
 
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