Need Help... SATA Drivers?

[Rami7007]

A few days ago i decided to reformat my pc... I dug up the windows xp disk, booted to CD, and began the setup. Everything was going fine and the drivers were loading until my computer decided to shut down before i could even get to the partitions screen. For a while i was confused but i realized it might be the fact that i dont have the drivers for my SATA harddrive... I have a chaintech nForce4 Ultra motherboard and cant seem to find the drivers... I did find some drivers on my motherboard CD, however, but i put them on a floppy and when windows says its loading the files from it the install hangs up and never continues... this is what happens when i neglect to press F6, however when i do press F6 the computer wont recodnize my floppy drive because its external and is recognized as the B drive and it insists to "place a disk into drive A."

I ended up finding another program to completely whipe my drive and was successful but i am still unable to install windows... I am very confused because when i initially built my PC i never had to have SATA drivers... and now that the harddrive is completely erased, it should be like when i first built my computer... the sata drivers might not even be the problem... i just dont know why my pc shuts down randomly in the middle of the setup but hangs and passes the point where it usually shuts down when i have the floppy with the drivers...

any ideas?

 

[Atheus]

It shouldn't just reboot when it can't find the drivers, it should give you an error I think...

Sounds like a hardware problem to me.

Is the hard drive making any strange noises? Have you had any unexplained bluesceens recently? Are all your fans/heatsinks free of dust and operating properly? What is the exact make and model of your power supply and how old is it?

 

[Rami7007]

i havent noticed any strange noises at all... and havent seen any blue screens or anything like that... and i just dusted my pc a couple weeks ago actually... my powersupply is the Cooler Master Real Power 450w and about 1.5 years old...

the thing is... it starts the setup and it goes through driver after driver of loading and then suddenly shuts off at the same place every time... however when i have the drivers in the floppy, it passes the place it always shuts off and then hangs at one of the files from the floppy... if it was hardware, it would shut down reguardless of the floppy being there.

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: Rami7007
i havent noticed any strange noises at all... and havent seen any blue screens or anything like that... and i just dusted my pc a couple weeks ago actually... my powersupply is the Cooler Master Real Power 450w and about 1.5 years old...

All good...

the thing is... it starts the setup and it goes through driver after driver of loading and then suddenly shuts off at the same place every time... however when i have the drivers in the floppy, it passes the place it always shuts off and then hangs at one of the files from the floppy... if it was hardware, it would shut down reguardless of the floppy being there.

I see - maybe the files on the floppy are corrupt?

 

[mechBgon]

An nForce4 Ultra SATA controller won't need drivers supplied, unless you've switched the controller into RAID mode. It's native ATA, as far as Windows Setup is concerned, and "just works" when it's working at all.

Questions:

1) what Service Pack level is your WinXP CD-ROM at?

2) what's the capacity of your boot drive?

3) have you unplugged all extra hard drives, memory-card readers, memory sticks and USB drives before starting Windows Setup?

4) if your motherboard has multiple SATA controllers, did you confirm you're really hooked up to the nF4 Ultra's own SATA jacks, rather than a different controller's SATA jacks (e.g. a Silicon Image or Promise PCI-based one)?

 

[Rami7007]

got it figured out... just wouldnt recognize the drivers from the external USB floppy... had to take an old floppy drive out of an old computer and hook it up to my computer...

im still confused though as to why the computer would shut down just because it couldnt find the drivers...