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ASUS A8N5X

R

rdclark1983

n00b
Joined
Nov 17, 2006
Messages
8
Ok not sure if this is a mobo question or not. I'll post it here and if not I apologize and please move it to the correct forum.

First my rig. Amd 64 x2 3800. Corsair pc3200 ram 2gig. Asus A8N5X. WD raptor 10k rpm 74 gig. ATI X1950XTX 512mb. Audigy 2zs.

Ok in this rig I originally had the exact same setup. But has a biostar board. Well my graphics card slot went out on the board so I just replaced the board with the one above. Last night I did a complete swap of all the parts to the new Asus board. Well since i only have one HD I believe I am not supposed to hit f6 during windows set up. However I make it a little ways into the installation and it says it can't find the hard drive. However on boot up it shows WD 74gig hd. So I know it's finding it. I just cannot get through the windows install process.

Reason I think this is a mobo issue is b/c like I said on the first mobo (biostar) everything worked fine on install. Zipped right through. Since graphics card slot went out, justreplaced the board with the ASUS listed above and now I can't get windows to install.

Also this is x64 version of windows. I appreciate any and all help!
 
OK, it has been awhile since I worked with an A8N5X so bear with me. My memory is pretty rusty.

I would check in the bios and make sure that the machine is pointed towards your drive in bios as the boot drive rather than an add in card or external drive or any such thing. Start there. The next thing might be to make sure that you are seated well in the socket. Seems like I have seen a couple of SATA drives flake from a bad seat or damaged plug.

If neither of these work, post back with more info on what is going on specifucally and let us see what we can puzzle out.

The reason nobody looked or helped is that they are all too wrapped up in the latest, greatest, most expensive, and can find little time to be a part of the community like they should. I bet there are ten people on this forum right now that can answer this question better than me, but they are busy off arguing about the color of the sata headers on the latest Nvidia offering for socket 775. :rolleyes:
 
Damn it, I like the purple headers rather than the orange ones :p.

Sounds like a bios issue about where you're trying to boot from. You shouldn't need the F6 unless you're running RAID. Try both of the SATA headers.

Honestly, I had a problem like this also once...I'm trying to remember how I fixed it :(. I think I had to reformat the whole drive and start over after booting off of a WD utility CD for their HDD's.
 
I don't have any experience with that particular MB, but I can tell you that if it's using a SI sata raid chip (makes no difference if your running raid or not) then the bios will see the drive but Windows won't unless you do the "f-6" thing while installing the OS. The sata drivers should be on the CD, so just put them on a floppy and give them to the great OS god when asked ! :)
 
Ok I'll definetely try those things. Won't be back to my cpu that im working on until monday. All I know is after I hit f8 to agree to the windows eula it'll either give me a blue screen death, or just reboot itself. I cannot remember the error messages but i'll be sure to post them on monday.

And just a side note. When I asked why no one was replying, I did not intend to be rude. I had it posted for a feew hours before anyone viewed it. I didn't know if I had done something wrong and people weren't able to view it. So I apologize. And thanks for info so far. More things to try. =)
 
i have the a8n-e and am running 2 sata wd hardrives.1 is a 36 gig raptor and 1 sata2 80gig.if i remember correctly i had to use a win 98 boot disk and delete the partitions with fdisk and then in bios under boot and hard drives had to set the order of which hd to use as 1st hd to boot.it was seen in bios but not in windows until i deleted the partition with fdisk.
just a quick note as to this motherboard and the a8n5x,same board except the ultra chip on the e model.its been one of the best boards ive owned.stable as a rock,o/clocks well with no voltage increases.i run a business off it and create web sites and also play.never have i had a crash or blue screen in the 10 months ive run it.i run a 3200 at 2550mhz 1 to 1 with corsair xms 3200c2 ram.i modified the shipset heatsink with the zalman and put a blower type fan on it.it clears my x800gto vid card and the chip runs tonite at 35.4c.anyway its a great board and my only upgrade will be a dual core in a few months.i hope your experience is as good as mine.i build computers for customers and i have about 8 of those boards in use and all are fine ,no failures and customers are very happy.great board for the money.
just a note that the sata2 hd is noticeably faster than the sata1.benches show it and in real world you see a difference.
 
Ok I spoke with ASUS tech help. They said there is on reason for me to hit F6 during setup. So that eliminates that.

Now when I let it run w/o hitting F6 sometimes it freezes at "starting windows" sometimes not. Well when I do get to the choice, where I have to tell it to format the drive, F8 for the eula, etc. it will start the install process. Then start saying it cannot copy random files. Such as Ndis. sys , mrxsmb.sys , rdbss.sys , volsnap.sys , raspptp. sys. Says the file setup placed on your HD is not a valid windows image. That is where I am at now.

Any suggestions? I await your responses. Thanks again for all of the help!
 
I think it was hit apon above by someone. Go to WD's website and get their tools for formatting and setting up the drive. Use it to prep your raptor before you start the install. I don't know why you would need to use the F6 option to get in, and I am certainly not sure why their seems to be such a problem getting the files to copy over unless you were using a backup copy of windows or have a corrupted disk.
 
Ok I have tried WD utility.

Now my only problem seems to be in the install process. It will make it to about 27% and slow down. And about 4 to 5 files after driver.cab it starts giving me random files that cannot be copied for the reason I stated above.

I have tried different cd roms. Even different xp disks. Have about 3 computers in the house all with own disks.

Any experienced this "locking up" issue. Or know of a way to manually move the files over to the hard drive?

As always all help is appreciated!
 
Good news first. I have gotten windows to install. Apparently the hangup on install was due to a memory stick I had in there. Now I know my mobo is completely compatable with 2 (1gig) sticks of pc3200 (ddr400) ram. But I try putting the stick back in there and windows will not boot up.

Does this mean faulty stick? (worked completely fine in my previous set up)

Or is there something in the bios that needs to be tweaked?

Thanks again!
 
Try setting your memory timings and voltage manually in bios. More voltage might help. You can also try testing each stick individually for errors and then together using memtest86. That should help you determine if you have some bad sticks.
 
Let me ask you this.

Ok I took one stick(b) out and everything worked fine. After windows install and everything I put the stick(b) back in and system wouldn't boot up. So I take the stick(b) out and it boots fine again. I then try that same stick(b) by itself replacing stick(a) and the system still wouldn't boot. So I right then ruled that stick(b) was defective. Because when I put stick(a) back in by itself the cpu boots fine.

Now I do not know the slightest about voltages, memtest or any of the latter. What are your thoughts on it now? Could it still be what you said?

Thanks a bunch!
 
put the good stick in the slot where the bad stick was and see if it boots up.if so the other stick is bad,if not then the slot or the memory controller is bad.
most likely the stick is just bad.i was just about to post to try 1 stick at a time when i saw you had tryed this.are both your sticks matched sticks for dual channel or are they different brands?if they were bought as a pair rma both sticks as a pair as they are matched with the same chips on each stick.
 
Definitely sounds like a bad memory stick. I'd RMA them both (if a pair) and get a new set.
 
you probly got this solved but just in case not...my a8n5x is very picky about 1t command rate when in dual channel .....im useing 4 X256 mb ocz LL ....
anyway i have to run 2t command rate or i get bod and random crashes
 
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