asus A7V8X problem

[nanaki333]

hey all,

i just bought an Asus A7V8X board and seem to be having some issues. i replaced my old board with it and tried to boot the old install of XP and it would get to loading windows but would just hang. i figured it wouldn't work or just have problems with the old install, so i put in the XP disc and booted that to do a fresh install. it would get through the checking hardware and then just hang after that when it says "starting windows". i've tried mixing my ram and just trying 1 stick at time in different slots and got the same results, aslo tried using the IDE cables it came with for shits 'n giggles, still nothin. my system is an athlon xp2400+, radeon9700 pro, 2x 256MB PC2700, 120GB hdd & 60GB hdd.

my cpu temp seems to be a bit higher with the asus board, but still nothin that'll cause system instability. in my current gigabyte ga-7vaxp my cpu temp idles around 39c, in the asus it idles around 43c.

anybody have any suggestions i should try? i was going to RMA it, but i'm not going to if ther's nothing wrong with the board.

thanks

 

[mechBgon]

Some people are running into an issue where they have a hard drive on a cable by itself, but aren't setting their drive's jumper to Single Drive. This particularly crops up with the Western Digitals. Either of yours fit that scenario? If so, try Single Drive and see if it works

If that doesn't apply or doesn't help, try starting setup from the CD-ROM with no hard drives attached at all. If it still stalls then something on the motherboard is probably throwing it a curve.

 

[nanaki333]

nah, i kept all other settings the same. i didn't touch any of my hdd's or cdrom drive's jumpers. i just swapped out my old board and left all the drives where they were. just don't see what would be causing this issue if nothing else was changed other than the board.

 

[mechBgon]

Is yours the version with SATA and gigabit LAN? If so, it would be good to disable the SATA controller in the BIOS. I can't find it in the manual per se, but it should be in the PCI Configuration or Integrated Peripherals section of the menus.

 

[nanaki333]

nope.. no serial ata on this one. it sees all my drives just fine and tries to bootup my previous install of xp but just hangs loading.

 

[mechBgon]

 

[nanaki333]

tried using an old ati rage fury agp card and even the unstoppable trident 4MB PCI video card and still had the same results. any ideas?

 

[mechBgon]

I'd be careful not to use old AGP cards if they might be 3.3V cards.

To go back a ways... when you say it gets through checking hardware and then just hangs, is that right at the beginning of the setup routine, or does it come later after you've created partitions, formatted, copied Windows files, etc?

One other idea that comes to mind is that you should probably run your RAM at PC2100 speeds so it's in sync with the CPU, but this sounds to me like a software issue if it persistently stops working at the same stage of Setup every time.

 

[nanaki333]

well, when i try to boot the XP disc to format and reinstall, it goes through the hardware check and it's lil routine, then it gets to the "starting windows", which is right before it lets you pick which partition you want to format or install windows on.

i tried forcing 8x agp with my 9700 cause i read that that fixed some issues with similair problems, but of course it did not help mine.

i have the latest bios revision as well.

 

[mechBgon]

Have you let it sit at that point for a while? I was thinking about the possibility that it's trying to get an IP address for the onboard NIC, if it recognizes it. It could take a while to decide "ok, not gonna get one" and move on. I'm probably wrong on that, but I'd let it idle for a while before I gave up.

If you don't have the memory at PC2100 speeds, I do think that could be worth trying. And I assume you have a pretty robust power supply and have the Radeon's auxiliary power lead plugged in?

 

[nanaki333]

yeah, i have a raidmax 500watt PSU.

i have let the pc just sit at the XP loading screen on the old install and actually forgot about it while i was on the phone for about 20 minutes, i came back down and it was still loading. as for the ram, it's set at 266fsb which is the speed of pc2100. i haven't overclocked it at all. the problem of it not wanting to install xp is still weird. it just hangs when it says "starting windows" in the lower left after doing the hardware check and does not go beyond that.