To make a long a painful story short, I just got a new motherboard (an ASROCK 939SLI32-eSATA2 to be exact), which itself is fine, but when paired with Windows gives me no end of headaches.
So, initially I reconnected all 4 of my hard drives, and when I booted I was greeted with the normal OS selection menu I have set up (same windows, two different kernels for the boot screen). Anyways, after selecting anything, it would go to a black screen and stay there. So, I tried to use the Windows Install disk, which would go to a black screen just after "Setup is detecting your hardware.." or whatever it says, and stay there for hours. I did find that disconnecting my main system drive would cause it to go through, but since that was the one drive I really did want it to see, that wasn't much of an option.
So, I booted from a linux live install CD and zeroed out the first partition on my system drive, which was only used as a place for the swapfile, so I didn't care. Then, I did manage to get the windows install to come up, at which point I reformatted the now blank partition, installed Windows, and rebooted.
Of course, if that was the end of it, I wouldn't be here. Now, the system says "Disk read error" when I try to boot. I've gone and installed Windows on every drive I have with the exception of the partition with the original Windows install on it, and with the same result for all of them. Since linux can boot and load all of them, I doubt that it is a controller problem, and the BIOS options are limited (SATA on/off AHCI/non-RAID/RAID, all of them tried except RAID). I even tried installing the driver for the RAID controller during installation to one of the disks, but it didn't do any good. Even only one drive at a time will cause the problem, and rearranging them does no good. In some configurations Windows install claims that I have no hard drives on my system, after which swapping two will cause it to see, but not boot from, any one of them.
So, If anyone knows what the problem is, let me know; I'd love to know what causes this.
Oh, and on another note, I did find a place where it was mentioned that with the plain 939SLI model of this board some people with dual partitioned hard drives that had Fedora on one partition would exhibit similar behavior with windows install, but after reformatting that would clear up. Since I don't have 30 Gigs of extra compatible storage on hand, I can't back up my smallest drive to see if a full reformat would fix the problem, but given that Windows has always been happy with just the one partition on this drive with reinstalls in the past, I don't think that's the problem (especially since sometimes when the installer formats a disk, it will cause the black screen hangup the next time I try to run it, indicating to me that it's having problems understanding the partition maps).
So, initially I reconnected all 4 of my hard drives, and when I booted I was greeted with the normal OS selection menu I have set up (same windows, two different kernels for the boot screen). Anyways, after selecting anything, it would go to a black screen and stay there. So, I tried to use the Windows Install disk, which would go to a black screen just after "Setup is detecting your hardware.." or whatever it says, and stay there for hours. I did find that disconnecting my main system drive would cause it to go through, but since that was the one drive I really did want it to see, that wasn't much of an option.
So, I booted from a linux live install CD and zeroed out the first partition on my system drive, which was only used as a place for the swapfile, so I didn't care. Then, I did manage to get the windows install to come up, at which point I reformatted the now blank partition, installed Windows, and rebooted.
Of course, if that was the end of it, I wouldn't be here. Now, the system says "Disk read error" when I try to boot. I've gone and installed Windows on every drive I have with the exception of the partition with the original Windows install on it, and with the same result for all of them. Since linux can boot and load all of them, I doubt that it is a controller problem, and the BIOS options are limited (SATA on/off AHCI/non-RAID/RAID, all of them tried except RAID). I even tried installing the driver for the RAID controller during installation to one of the disks, but it didn't do any good. Even only one drive at a time will cause the problem, and rearranging them does no good. In some configurations Windows install claims that I have no hard drives on my system, after which swapping two will cause it to see, but not boot from, any one of them.
So, If anyone knows what the problem is, let me know; I'd love to know what causes this.
Oh, and on another note, I did find a place where it was mentioned that with the plain 939SLI model of this board some people with dual partitioned hard drives that had Fedora on one partition would exhibit similar behavior with windows install, but after reformatting that would clear up. Since I don't have 30 Gigs of extra compatible storage on hand, I can't back up my smallest drive to see if a full reformat would fix the problem, but given that Windows has always been happy with just the one partition on this drive with reinstalls in the past, I don't think that's the problem (especially since sometimes when the installer formats a disk, it will cause the black screen hangup the next time I try to run it, indicating to me that it's having problems understanding the partition maps).
