New system grief

[Herhey]

I recently purchased a new system:

ASUS A8N-E NFORCE 4 S939 MOTHERBOARD
AMD ATHLON 64 3700+ S939 64BIT CPU
1024MB PC-3200 DDR400 RAM (2X512MB)
160GB 7200RPM 8MB SATA HDD (Maxtor 6V160E)
GEFORCE 6600GT 128MB DDR3 PCI-e VIDEO CARD
ANTEC SONATA II CASE W/450W POWER SUPPLY
16x DVD+/- RW Dual Layer Drive IDE (lg)
Integrated 7.1 channel CODEC
Integrated 10/100/1000 Network Interface

There was no OS installed to the system.
I used Winxp Pro with SP2 integrated.
When it got to the point about asking to format and partition the drives,
I selected a ntfs format (not quick), and selcted about 50 gig each for the partitions.
Making a total of 3.

And let it go to work on it.
When it finished, it got to the Winxp boot screen and that's it.
I would see the little progress bar moving every once in awhile it would stop and start up again. (the progress bar I mean)
But stayed on that screen (for quite awhile), it never went any further.
Every time I would re-boot same thing.

When I checked the forum I saw BipolarBill's post:
"Having trouble installing Win2K or XP on a SATA or RAID drive?"
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=150897

Since this is my first experience with a SATA drive, I didn't know to use any other dirvers or special procedures.

So I tried setting up windows again following the steps in the post.
I got the required utility from asus to make a driver disk. for the 3rd party storage driver.
(step 3 in BipolarBill's post)

It showed 2 drivers, they both said (required) after them.
Even though one of them was for raid, so I installed both.

When I rebooted again winxp started going through the rest of the installtion process.
Setting drivers, time zone, asking for serial, etc...

Then when it rebooted the system, it gets to the point where the OS should be booting up, I get nothing.
Just a blank, black screen. (not even the boot screen)

I went to maxtor's site and got their maxblast utility.
It recognizes the hard drive, and I ran all kinds of tests using thier utility and it passed them all.

When I went to a dos prompt (using a boot disc), I tried to access the C dirve (C:\) and it couldn't read it.
(I can't remember the exact error message).

What I think I will try next is do a low level format (zero out) the drive using the utility.

And then try to install windows xp again, making sure to use the storage driver disc at the right time.

I was only going to pick the driver for large drives (I believe that's what it was called).
And not install the raid one as well (like last time).

My question is, should I install both the drivers it asks for?

Also...

Could someone please give me ANY suggestions for other things to try, or keep in mind.

Thank you for your time.

Herhey

P.S.
Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I didn't know where else to put it.

[bulwark]

did you have any luck? I'd like to help, but I really don't know what it could be. For me, thus far, setting up my SATA HDs hasn't been a problem at all, so the best I can do is bump it up and hope someone else here can offer some suggestions.

[Scott Sherman]

Ok first off, NEVER make all the partitions at once during the OS install. Just make a single 50GB partition and see if you can get it up and running. You should not need any of the drivers from NVIDIA for RAID Controller since you are not running RAID. Meaning no F6 to hit during install. Make sure in the BIOS that the SATA drive is chosen to be the boot drive.

Have any questions call IM me and I will walk you thru it.

[Herhey]

Thanks for the replies.
It turns out the hard drive was screwed.

Took it back to where I got the system, and they replaced the drive, and installed the OS to make sure it was working.

Then formated the drive an returned the system to me.
I Installed the os, with no problems.

Thanks again for your help.

Herhey

[3D_Mind]

Good, glad to hear that has been solved. :D Now you can get on with things, like BSODs, slow boot up, program crashing, graphical glitchs and all the other fun features of WinXP! Just kidding, hope it works better from now on.

[bulwark]

congrats on getting the new system running. How much did it set you back?

[Herhey]

Little over $900 (canadian).

Maybe I should have forked over a little more and got 2 gigs or ram.
Oh well things seem to run well.

Herhey

[bulwark]

that's not bad...not sure which part of Canada you live in, but there's a store in toronto that's selling kingston valuram, 512, ddr400, for about $38 cdn.

[tomato]

Glad to hear the good news Herhey :) It sucks when the problem is bad hardware/component... to go through all that trouble and troubleshooting, only to find out it was a bad component.... frustrates me to no end :evil: :evil:

[Herhey]

When stuff like that happens, I usualy think it's my fault.
like I missed something I was supposed to do, or did something wrong during setup.

Herhey

[Gray]

When stuff like that happens, I usualy think it's my fault.
like I missed something I was supposed to do, or did something wrong during setup.

Thats funny, I always think that. lol.

I was going to say format drive into 1 partition, install XP and then use Partition magic to allocate the partitions you wanted.

Glad it is working for ya! Decint rig for sub thousand bucks!
Get the extra gig of ram later.