Another confusing vista install

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p8ball4life

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Mar 10, 2008
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Built my new computer and I am having trouble installing Vista ultimate x64 on it.

Initial install with 2 MSI 8800GTS and 2 sticks of 2gb Corsair ddr2 800 failed. It boots into the cd install and then reboots without warning. After doing this for a few times it may or may not throw a bsod.

Tried it with 1 stick and 2 cards, 1stick 1 card, 2 sticks 1 card, all the same problem.

Made sure to relax the memory timings to 5-5-5-15 and the same problem occurred. Is it a possible bios issue? I tried unhooking one of the hard drives. It did not help.

I'll try it with an ide drive tomorrow.

Any help would be appreciated.



System Specs:
750w Corsair TX
MSI P7n diamond
Q6600 SLACR
Tuniq Tower w/ Scythe fan
Xclio Windtunnel
MSI 8800GTS OC x2
Corsair DDR2 800
Samsung DvD R SATA
WD 500gb SE16 x2
 
so, what did metest say?

I know its trendy to blame vista for an obvious hardware problem, but I would bet more on some memory/power issues.

anecdotal: my motherboard didn't provide enough voltage for my ram, stock. I had to crank it all the way up to 2.0v for my system to be stable.
 
I'm guessing its your RAM, HDD, or Optical drive (or cable). Run memtest to test your RAM. DL, burn, and run a HDD diagnostic tool (from the drive manufacturer's website). Try an IDE optical drive. You could also try updating your BIOS... what version is it?
 
I ran the vista mem-test and it didn't find anything.

What's the best way to get memtest running w/out a floppy? Do they make a bootable cd?

I think the problem is the SATA optical, I'm going to try my old IDE later and report back.

The ram voltage may be viable as well :)

Thanks guys!
 
Still no luck. I double checked the 2.1volts to memory, tried switching the SATA optical to the SATA1 spot, tried switching the 1 hard drive to SATA1, tried an IDE drive with the SATA disconected.... Same exact problem.
 
I've never had to flash before, but MSI support said I needed too.

I couldn't make the bootable CD work even though I used nero. It wouldn't access my cdrom to get the files off of it. THen the MSI sends me floppy boot instructions, but alas the files wont fit on the floppy in addition to the DOS boot stuff.

THe USB flash was appealing, but you have to have an operating system on your computer with the MSI board. I went to set it up on my laptop and it told me no MSI board found.

Brand new computer waiting for a new flash and I can't do anything with it Sad

The problem I am having is that vista x64 won't install, it just loads the files for 20seconds then reboots. I've tried everything from swapping dimm slots, SATA slots, using an IDE optical, using 1 video card, etc. Nothing works.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
First, run the extended memory test, the basic is stupid. I've had basic miss stuff that extended finds.
 
One pass of extended windows memory diagnostic or memtest will be sufficient, but do 2 just to be safe. I prefer the bootable windows memory diagnostic myself, not the vista one, because it shows real time updates on all errors. The Vista one just says whether or not an error is found, the boot one shows you what bank it was.
 
I have one stick of ram in and ran memtest86+ for 3.5 passes, not a single error

The same problem is occurring when I try to install XP 32bit. I'm going to see about running the HD tool now because the memory looks good, and the bios flash didn't help......UGH
 
I suggested this in another post.

Try looking in the bios and see the settings for your HD, does yr bios recognize them? Also check to see if yr bios is settings for your HD say RAID, switch to IDE that might work.
 
The drives are SATA, and the bios does detect them.


Do you think I should up the voltage on the memory even more, closer to 2.8? I am afraid to do this, but all of the signs are pointing to the memory being bad, even though memtest isn't confirming this.

I'd really like ot get this thing going!
 
p8ball4life said:
Do you think I should up the voltage on the memory even more, closer to 2.8?
Click to expand...

NO! You'll kill the RAM that way.

Did you run any HDD diagnostic tests? If possible, try to test the RAM, HDD, DVD drive, video cards and PSU on another system.

If everything checks out, it may be the motherboard.
 
I have not been able to test the hard drives. The diagnostic tool off of WD doesn't want to run for me. Are there any bootable floppy versions of hard drive tests for the WD Caviar SE16 500gb?
 
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