asus a7v8x-x black screen

[phreakboy]

I am in the process of putting together a computer, it has an asus A7V8X-x motherboard, with a sentron 2500 processor and 256 megs of ram. I have been trying to put windows xp on it, but it wont boot from the cd, so I tried booting from floppy disk, and it will start to read the disk, and then just go to a black screen. I tried several different boot disks with the same result each time. So I tried using another computer to put xp on the drive, and now when I try to boot on that hard drive it just does the same thing start to read from the drive and then goes to a black screen. So I tried sticking in a different drive that has windows me on it and all I get is "invalid boot disk". The first harddrive is a western digital 40 gig, and the second drive was a quantum fireball 30 gig. Any help that could given would be greatly appreciated, as my dead line of christmas is coming very fast. Thanks in advance.


Sean V

 

[alzan]

Are all your drives recognized properly in BIOS? Are the drive jumpers set properly, should be set for single drive only on a one HDD system.

Before attempting a new install, try going into your BIOS and specifying your optical drive as the first boot device. Also, if you have (or can get) the drive manufacturers utilities, use them to diagnose and/or zero out whichever hard drive you're attempting the install on, then try the install with a "clean" drive.

alzan

 

[phreakboy]

yes everything is detected in the bios fine, and all the jumpers seem to be set fine, but no matter what I try I just cant get it to work. I also already had changed the boot sequence around numerous times but nothing is working

 

[mechBgon]

Is your Windows CD a genuine, bootable one? Can you start Windows Setup using that CD on a different computer?

Also, to reiterate a point made by alzan, with WD drives you must set their jumper to Single Drive mode, and NOT Master or Slave, if they are on their own separate data cable.

Other common errors: consult the first link here. If you want more-focused assistance then it would help to know as much detail about your hardware as possible, and you can hit Quote and fill in this template if you want:

• CORE HARDWARE
  
  • Power supply Antec TruePower 430
  • Motherboard Asus K8N-E Deluxe
    • Revision 1.03
    • BIOS 1005
  • CPU Athlon64 3000+
    • Core 130nm Clawhammer
  • Memory (2) 512MB Corsair XMS 3200C2 modules
    • Voltage Manually set to 2.7 volts
    • Timings AUTO, results in 2-3-2-6 @ 200MHz
• CARDS
  • Primary video card ATI Radeon 9800Pro AGP 8x
  • Secondary video card Heh, I wish
  • PCI slot #1 (top) empty
  • PCI slot #2 empty
  • PCI slot #3 LeadTek Winfast TV/FM tuner card
  • PCI slot #4 Creative Audigy 2 ZS
  • PCI slot #5 LSI Logic Ultra160 SCSI
  • PCI slot #6 (board only has five PCI slots)
• DRIVES
  • Boot drive 160GB Seagate 7200.7
    • Interface Serial ATA
    • Controller hosting this drive nForce3 SATA controller
    • Jumper setting not applicable (SATA)
  • Additional hard drive 40GB Seagate 7200.7
    • Interface Parallel ATA
    • Controller hosting this drive nForce3 standard ATA controller, primary channel
    • Jumper setting Master
  • Additional hard drive 18GB Seagate Cheetah 15k.3
    • Interface SCSI
    • Controller hosting this drive LSI Logic U160 card
    • Jumper setting SCSI ID 01
  • Optical drive #1 NEC 3500A DVD burner
    • Interface Parallel ATA
    • Controller hosting this drive nForce3 standard ATA controller, secondary channel
    • Jumper setting Master
  • Optical drive #2 Lite-On combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW
    • Interface Parallel ATA
    • Controller hosting this drive nForce3 standard ATA controller, secondary channel
    • Jumper setting Slave
• OS AND SECURITY
  • Operating System WindowsXP Professional
  • Service Pack SP2
  • Internet connection Cable
  • Hardware firewall Netgear RP614 router
  • Software firewall WindowsXP firewall
  • Antivirus Norton Antivirus 2004

Naturally, you don't have the OS & Security stuff yet. Tips on that area since you're at the proper point to be thinking about it.