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Windows XP installation fails on SATA drive

O

Ouminan

Junior Member
Hi, I hope you guys can help me because I'm at my wits end!

Specs are as follows:
Athlon64 2800+
EPoX 8KDA3J (nForce3 250Gb chipset)
512MB KingMax PC3200 DDR
Fujitsu 160GB SATA Hard Drive
GeForce 6600GT AGP

Tested installation with
8X Sony DVD Drive
Toshiba DVD +/- RW Drive
Old No Name CD Drive

I used the SATA drivers for the nForce3 from EPoX's global website, and their US website, both allowing the installation to recognize the 160GB capacity of the drive. Without the driver, it recognizes it as ~ 128GB drive.

I have a slipstreamed Windows XP SP2 installation CD that cannot be read by ANY drive. This is unusual as I've been using the CD to install on all of my computers without any problems. I had to fall back to my original Windows XP Pro CD which has no problem booting.

However during the installation, random files will be unaccessible. At one point the installation failed with a BSOD citing some error with the CDFS. Other times the installation completed only to BSOD during boot. Another problem that cropped up was Windows would fail upon completion with an corrupted or missing NTFS.sys.

I have no idea what to do. Let me know if you guys need any more information.

Thanks!

-Andrew
 
A. Are you sure that driver is good? I have heard that some SATA drivers are not good from the manufacturters websites.
B. Are you sure the CD is good? If you are getting files not being copied correctly it could be a bad CD.
C. Are you positive the software you got from the website opens up 48bit LBA mode in WinXP?
I know it is unbelievable to think Microsoft's latest OS cant work with drives larger than 128GB out of the box. But this is the reality of a monopoly. If for whatever reason WinXP is not enabled to for this and the install somehow wrote to parts of thr disk beyond 128GB it will shat on you.

I believe even with SP2 you are required to apply the reg hack to enable it.

 
Thanks for the reply Genx,

I'm not sure about the driver being good, but I've been browsing around and haven't found any reported problems with EPoX and their drivers. I also tried two different versions, although I will probably begin experimenting with releases from other mobo manufacturers like Asus and MSI.

I'm positive the CD is good. I can install off of either CD on any of my functional computers. One is a pressed CD from Microsoft, although that may not mean much. 🙂

I'm also not sure if it opens up 48-bit LBA mode within Windows XP, although I'm curious as to know if its possible to format the drive to, say, a 60GB partition and install from there. Will that circumvent any problems that may occur involving hard disks over the recognizable size of the disk?
 
Try to go to the manufactuer of the SATA controllers website for a driver. It might be a faster more reliable option.

As for the 60GB partition. I would imagine that should work if this is the problem. For the life of me I cant believe they would release an OS without the ability to address higher than 128GBs.

 
Ugh, problem resolved...

I did a ton of things before running the installation again, so I'm not too sure, but I'd bet money that updating my BIOS helped the most.

Steps taken:
Switched IDE DVD drive to cable select.
Flashed BIOS (dated 7/16/04) to most recent (10/22/04)
Reduced RAM timing

Anyways, it seems so ridiculous that a production motherboard would have problems with 1 SATA drive and 1 PATA Optical drive. Arghhh.

Not everyone is willing to flash their new/non-working mobo out of the box.

-Andrew
 
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