Problem installing win2000 on Maxtor HD

[gwgman]

This week has got be my worst computer week ever. I am building a computer. I got, kt7a-raid (i dont use the raid though), 1.4ghz amd tbird, 256 ram, 40 gig maxtor hard drive. I have been trying to install i windows 2000 and I am having no luck. It seems to be my motherboard or computer, because i have tried installing win2000 on 2 other hard drives, using the computer i just built, but it doesnt work. But when i try to install windows2000 on my 2 hewlett packard computers, it works fine.

It worked when I installed windows 98 (not the second edition). BUT NOT 2000!!!!!1

First, I was getting an NTLDR IS MISSING error. I then used a windows 98 boot disk, and typed SYS C: at the command prompt, and i think that it fixed it. I tried installing win2000 off the 2000 boot disks then the win98 boot disk. It fails each time. Now, after it finished tranfering the files to the hard drive, right before it restarts the computer, a blue error screen comes up, that says different stuff everytime.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening only on the computer with the kt7a-raid, and not the hewlett packards?????

 

[gwgman]

Anyone have any ideas? Or does anyone have windows 2000 installed on a computer with a kt7a-raid motherboard?

 

[WebDude]

What version of the bios are you running? The bios for this mb contains the bios for the HotRod Raid controller, and when you update the one the other is automatically updated too. You might try the latest bios if you're not currently running it.

I did an install of Win2k from the boot CD (after of course I had created the Raid pair from 2 maxtor hd's). The only difference is of course you have to tell the Win2K program you have a driver disk, and then give it the driver disk for the Hot Rod Raid setup. Went very smoothly.

I should say the KT7A mb I installed this on is one I got back from RMA'ing a bad one. It had lockup, instability problems. In it's last days, I couldn't install Win2k on it. I would get through the first part of the Win2K install, and when the computer would reboot, it would say it couldn't find ntldr, or else I would get a blue screen. Sounds like what you got going on. Don't know what went wrong with it, but the one I got back from the RMA is working fine now.

You might try uping the vcore and i/o voltages one notch in the bios. That worked for me on a KT7a (not Raid) that I was having lockup problems on.

WebDude

 

[inqztive]

It's very likely a Bad ram problem. It stores the data in a bad sector of RAM while installing it and gets stuck. Win2k uses the RAM in different way than Win98. So even if the RAM is bad (some sectors) Win 98 may be able to boot up (but likely to have problems) and that is not unusual.

 

[inqztive]

Also make sure that your hard drive is on the normal IDE channel and not on the RAID channel. Read the mobo documentation properly to shee which ones are IDE channels and it will be a good idea to disable the RAID channels while you are installing the OS. Go to bios and set it the first boot device as Cd rom and restart with the Win2k CD in the CD rom. You don't have to Fdisk to install win2k. You can format the hard drive using the CD. Reformat your hard drive and do a clean install.