GA-945P-S3 and Vista

[BrandonH75]

Greetings!

I'm having problems trying to install Vista Home Premium on a SATA drive on a GA-945P-S3 board. I'm having the "crcdisk.sys" issue that I've been reading a lot about, but any of the possible solutions I find don't work for me. I'm hoping I'm just missing something obvious (which I've been known to do), and hoping that someone here could help me out.

MB: GA-945P-S3 rev. 1.0
CPU: Pentium D 3.4 GHz
HDD: Maxtor 160GB SATA
Video: MSI RX300HM-TDI28E
Chipset: Northbridge Intel 945P Express, Southbridge ICH7
LAN: onboard RTL8111B
Audio: onboard Realtek ALC883

Everything runs perfectly fine if I use a normal IDE drive...it's the SATA one I can't get to work. If I do a clean install from XP, it will see the drive and copy all of the files. Upon reboot I get the 7B stop error when Windows is trying to start. Trying in safe mode the error comes up when loading crcdisk.sys

Next I tried loading directly from the DVD. I finally got a hold of the driver for the SATA controller so that setup could see the drive. Upon restart after copying the files, the stop error doesn't even show up, it just reboots itself, again at crcdisk.sys.

I've updated the BIOS. There is no RAID on this board, which I've heard causes problems. I've tried all of the different settings for the SATA/IDE in the BIOS. I've also heard that having USB keyboard/mouse support enabled could cause it, but disabling those made no difference. The update advisor was only concerned about the audio.

I've tried all the possible solutions I could find, and it runs beautifully on the IDE drive, so I really don't know what else to try to fix it for the SATA, if that's even possible. The board is supposed to be "Vista Ready".

If anyone here has any ideas I would be very greatful. Thanx!

 

[BrandonH75]

Well I think I finally got it working! Here's what I did...

First I read something on the Intel site about using port 3 for a SATA drive with the ICH7. This change allowed me to get safe mode started, which didn't help much because Windows setup can't finish in safe mode. Regular Windows boot was still resulting in rebooting itself. But at least I got a little farther.

Next I stumbled across some beta drivers for this SATA storage controller (v. 8.2.0.1011 rather than 8.1.1.1010). I'm not really sure if they are beta since they are dated last November, but they are newer than the ones available on both Intel's and Gigabyte's website. So I ran Windows setup again with these drivers. Still no change. I disconnected my DVD and floppy drives at this point...I was about to give up for good.

Now I figured I'd play around with BIOS settings again. I started going through every setting for the 'On-Chip SATA mode'. Once I had this set on 'Enhanced' Windows actually made it as far as a blank screen with the 'busy' mouse pointer...then restarted itself. This time it got a little farther than that...and restarted. Third time is the charm...since then everything has been running OK. Updating everything, restarting a lot, and so far Vista is happy...and so am I.