New XP Pro install problem I've not seen on this forum - help

[ppanagos]

I've followed the forum for some time on how to install a SATA (160GB SEAGATE in my case) as the boot drive for XP so I thought that I was ready to give it a try. I've tried two approaches to the installation (you'll see why two shortly). In the first approach I disconnected my ATA drives (one was my current XP boot drive), the SATA drivers were read successfully from the floppy, additional files were copied from the DVD/CDROM drive. Then when it came time to check that the XP CD was legitimate, it said that it either could not read the drive or the CD was not a legitimate XP CD (which it is). It looked like it didn't even try to read the CDROM drive (no light flashed) so I was never able to get past this point in the installation using this approach (I even tried another CDROM drive with the same result).

For the second attempt, I kept my ATA drives connected. All went well in that Windows found an existing version of XP installed on one of the ATA drives so that reading the CDROM was not an issue. From there the installation continued well, except there were two warnings about using non-Windows logo drivers (one for the SATA drive and the other was not identified) for which I told it to proceed with the installation. After rebooting there were two XP choices to choose from: one for the original ATA hosted OS and the other for the SATA hosted OS. Choosing the SATA, the black Windows XP logo screen came-up normally for a few seconds and then went blank, and after a few seconds more a blue screen saying there had been an "unknown hard error c0000415". The system was hung-up, and rebooting again let me go into safe mode in which everything looked OK but another reboot got the same error message.

I'd appreciate any help in the first instance as to why when doing the check for a valid XP CDROM it was unable to either see the CDROM (which it had just been files from) or see that the CD was a valid XP installation CD. In the second case, why it cannot boot succesfully from the SATA drive even though it seemed to do the installation OK. Thanks for any insights you can provide.

 

[mechBgon]

It would help to know more about your hardware, especially what brand & model the motherboard is

 

[ppanagos]

My appologies: The MB is an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe; 512MB RAM
160 GB Seagate SATA Drive
Pioneer A-105 DVD- RW
Using the built-in SATA interface on the MB
I'll have to check to make certain but the BIOS is 1.06
By the way, the SATA drive worked fine before as a regular drive in conjunction with ATA drive as the system drive.

 

[mechBgon]

Thanks for the update I have the same motherboard myself here at home. While it technically should not be necessary for the Setup phase in question to complete, did you have the SATA controller selected as a boot device in the motherboard's BIOS > Advanced menu? You'd pick "SCSI" since the motherboard views PCI-based disk controllers as "SCSI." For the installation to finally function, you'd want it to be set that way in the end.

Other than that, you might update to the latest BIOS for your board, being careful to choose the one that is appropriate for your particular PCB revision from Asus's list, because in the BIOS notes, they do mention that the latest 1007 BIOSes update the SATA ROM. The Asus Windows-based BIOS-flash utility is available on the A7N8X's CD-ROM and should be a safe method of updating the BIOS (yeah, famous last words... ).

Good luck!

 

[ppanagos]

Thanks for the reply. I did have SCSI enabled as a boot device in the BIOS. I'll try the BIOS update. I've done it once before successfully so hopefully it will not be an issue.

 

[ppanagos]

I went to update my BIOS and it turns out that I already have installed version 1007 of the BIOS (my board is version 1.04, by the way). So, back to square one !

 

[mechBgon]

Bummer!

I don't know if this is technically sound advice or just a wild notion, but the next thing I would try (aside from breaking the SATA plugs off the motherboard and calling it done :evil: ) is to start Windows Setup, get to the point where I can work with the partitioning, delete all the existing partitions so the drive has no partitions at all, and then exit Setup with the drive still having no partitions. Then I would start Setup again afterwards and see if my result were different.

But as you say, it seems very strange for Setup to suddenly forget how to access the CD-ROM drive If you ever resolve this, make sure to share the solution, ok?

 

[ppanagos]

I deleted the partition (the only one on the SATA drive) and started installation over. It did not even see the SATA drive even though I had loaded the drivers for the SATA drive by pressing F6. Hmmmmm !!

 

[mechBgon]

Have you gone into the Promise controller's own BIOS and defined the drive as an array? If not, give that a try. I'm happily ignorant of the whole issue since I use PATA at home and SCSI at work, but that may be a necessary step with your controller too. There are some instructions in the owners' manual towards the end covering the Promise controller's BIOS.

 

[ppanagos]

I thought that since I was able to use my SATA drive when I was still using my ATA drive as the boot drive, the Promise Controller's BIOS must have been setup correctly. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a try as soon as I can (later today if possible). Thanks.

 

[ppanagos]

After deleting the partition on the SATA drive a restarting the installation, windows does not see the drive at the time of choosing where to install a new version of XP. The drive is set up as drive 0 in the RAID setup and the BIOS sees the drive. I also loaded the SATA drivers using F6. Any further thoughts ?? (off to church)