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Furious - Original Problem Returns

Dorkenstein

Dorkenstein

Diamond Member
After more than a month and several hundred dollars, I am back in square one. I got my SATA drive to get recognized and my windows xp cd to be read, but now after formatting in setup and restarting, windows xp setup just starts over. If I set the hard drive to first boot the computer just restarts in an endless loop. This was the problem I had with my OLD motherboard, not this new one. Any more help? Thank you very much.

ECS Nforce4-A754
AMD 64 3700+
Kingston ValueRam
Maxtor 300gb Diamondmax SATA converted to EIDE
DYNEX DVD-Rom Drive
 
do you have any other drives in the system? afaik, when installing xp on sata, you should remove any other drives, especially ide hard drives.
 
Well I converted my SATA drive to IDE with an Addonics adapter. Once I did that it appeared in BIOS and was recognized, which it wasn't before, but the old genuine IDE drive I had disappeared. I think its because I have the jumper set to master instead of cable select. Also, I have the SATA -> IDE drive set to foremost in the "Hard Drive Boot Priority" part of my BIOS but I have the same problem.
 
1) Ditch the ECS board and get something worth spending money on.

2) Is there a CD in the drive still that it is booting from? I'm not sure what you are having it boot from. If you just format in setup and restart...yeah setup will start from the CD because the HD is blank. Do you mean you formatted and then INSTALLED?

Is there only one HD in the system? What happens if you take the CD out of the drive?
 
1) Ditch the ECS board and get something worth spending money on.
Click to expand...

That is about the worst advice i have ever seen on AT. Never, and i mean never, replace hardware unless you are sure its the problem. Here is what you do. Remove everything except the cdrom/dvd and the hard drive on the sata channel. Leave in the ram, and the cpu. Boot it. Make sure you are using the floppy to install the sata drivers. Once you get into windows installation, format the drive. Then do the boot again and use the sata drivers again to start installing windows. After you have successfully installed windows, set the boot drive to be on the sata channel. Also, remember, on ide, the master is the first connector to the motherboard. The slave is the farthest from it. So make sure they are 100% correct before you even try to boot it up. Also, make sure you arent using the primary ide for rom drives. Even though i have read its fine to do so, i dont like it so i dont do it.

Also, before doing all of this, clear the cmos on the motherboard before you do anything i just told you. Make sure you do this, because the mobo needs to be reset. If you cant find the jumper, use the battery and pull it off and leave it off for 30 seconds or so.

Report back here to let us know how its going.

 
Originally posted by: Tbirdkid
1) Ditch the ECS board and get something worth spending money on.
Click to expand...

That is about the worst advice i have ever seen on AT. Never, and i mean never, replace hardware unless you are sure its the problem. Here is what you do. Remove everything except the cdrom/dvd and the hard drive on the sata channel. Leave in the ram, and the cpu. Boot it. Make sure you are using the floppy to install the sata drivers. Once you get into windows installation, format the drive. Then do the boot again and use the sata drivers again to start installing windows. After you have successfully installed windows, set the boot drive to be on the sata channel. Also, remember, on ide, the master is the first connector to the motherboard. The slave is the farthest from it. So make sure they are 100% correct before you even try to boot it up. Also, make sure you arent using the primary ide for rom drives. Even though i have read its fine to do so, i dont like it so i dont do it.

Also, before doing all of this, clear the cmos on the motherboard before you do anything i just told you. Make sure you do this, because the mobo needs to be reset. If you cant find the jumper, use the battery and pull it off and leave it off for 30 seconds or so.

Report back here to let us know how its going.
Click to expand...

Yeah need more information to troubleshoot this issue.

But...yeah he really should get rid of that ECS board. It may not fix this problem but it will most likely fix the problem of the board crapping out later. ECS are the most horrible boards I've ever worked with.

I remember when first starting work as a tech at this one shop they were building about 50 computers and they were going to use ECS boards in them. I told them not to but they didn't listen to me.

Every single one of those motherboards failed within 2 years. EVERY ONE.
 
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