Trying to install Windows 2000 on new machine but not going too well...

[Fleex]

I just recently built a new machine with:

Asus A7N8X deluxe motherboard, Athlon XP 2400, Asus V9280S GeForce 4 Ti 4200, 120GB Western Digital HD, with generic cd-rom and floppy drives (for now).

I've had some experience building computers before, and after confirming with my friends, I think I've done everything correct so far. The trouble comes with trying to install Windows 2000 for the first time on this machine.

First of all, the IDE drive detect time upon booting up is ridiculously long (over 1 minute). Is this normal? What could I have done wrong to cause this? My BIOS setup is to boot from floppy first, cd-rom second (temporarily, so it will find the Windows 2000 install cd), and hard drive third.

Second, when the drives are finally detected, and I seem to be installing Windows 2000 alright, but when it goes to reboot the machine after copying the necessary files to the hard drive, it seems to be searching for a bootable disk again. I've never encountered a machine so stubborn in refusing an OS before. Any ideas anyone?

 

[mechBgon]

I have a suggestion: start by making sure "LAN" isn't one of the boot options in the BIOS. Refer to pages 52 and 53 of the manual. If that doesn't help, then as a troubleshooting step, disable the onboard network controllers in the motherboard's BIOS for now. Look at page 58 of the manual, and you want to disable both the Onboard Lan (nVidia) and Onboard Lan (3Com) to see if this helps.

Good luck and welcome to the Forums 😀

 

[redbeard1]

Double check the settings on the drive. I've had systems boot like that and it turned out that the jumpers weren't set right. It would act just as you said, taking a long time to detect and boot. Some drives need to be set for 'stand alone', others need to be set for 'with slave'. Something to check.

 

[Fleex]

 

[Fleex]

oops, i meant to say that i disabled the start on LAN functions before i tried installing windows 2000.

as for the settings of my drive redbeard, i bought the hd oem, so i have no manuals for it, but it's my only hd and i set the jumper on it "master". that should be alright don't you think?

other than that, i'm not sure what other jumpers are you referring to. please continue to enlighten me.

 

[redbeard1]

Is the hard drive on the same ide channel as the cdrom? In the past WD drives were fussy about the master/stand alone setting. If it had another device on the same cable, it needed to be master, if it didn't, the jumper needed to be set to stand alone. If the drive doesn't have clear directions for the jumper settings, the WD site would have them. Maybe they don't use that stand alone setting any more, but it's something to check.

 

[mechBgon]

Also, with a couple of recent WD's I used, to set them for standalone, the label indicated I should remove the jumper from the pins entirely.

 

[Richard98]

I have a WD-120 and read somewhere that it should be set to "cable select", not master or slave. Had mine set to "master" and have lost all data on the drive twice.

 

[23skidoo]

I believe if you check on the drive label you might see a setting for Master w/no slave connected; use either that or Cable Select. You should be installing the os on just a bare-bones system: vid card, floppy, hd, cdrom, one stick of memory only. Disable all USB till after the install is completed. Don't worry about W2K seeking for a cd after the first reboot, just ignore it and it will go ahead and do it's thing from the hard drive after the initial batch of setup files have been installed. Finally, if you continue to have problems, you may need to download the WD drive management utils and do a complete low-level format on the drive. Good Luck.