Can't boot Vista on SATA drive

Meow.

Meow.

Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2001
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I don't know whether it's a MoBO problem or what. I have a Asus A8N32-SLI Delux motherboard and Vista recognizes the harddrive and will start the install on the SATA harddrive, but when it does the first reboot after expanding the files it just comes up with a blank screen. I have 4 harddrives, 2 IDE and 2 SATA, 1 sata drive just purchased for installation of Vista Ultimate. so i didn't know if the other harddrives were giving it problems so i unhooked ALL the harddrives except the 1 SATA drive specifically for Vista. Started the install and got to the same point, would reboot, and then just go blank with JUST the 1 SATA drive. i made sure the bios was pointing to the right drive and all that good stuff. but to no avail. so now i have Vista Ultimate installed on one of the IDE drives and everything worked fine. Dual Boot runs fine, but i just didn't want to install it on the IDE drive. I haven't activated it yet, so i still have 28 days left to toy around with it and find a solution to my problem.

Sorry for being long winded, but any help is appreciated! thanks!
 
Is your SATA drive set to your first boot drive in the BIOS after the CD/DVD drive? If that is the case then that leads me to believe that your SATA is going bad. I have vista installed on 2 raptor drives in RAID 0 and have had no issues.
 
Does that board have two different Sata controllers? Like one from Nvidia and one for raid? have u tried switching Sata ports?
 
The SMARTEST thing you said there and I give you kudos for saying it was:

You didn't activate it yet. SMART SMART SMART... ok, I'll lay off the caps now. :)

I had the same issue recently, and it's because - at least this is what I figured out - Vista has the proper text mode driver for your SATA controller, meaning it's used during the text mode setup (the early stages) of the Vista installation, but that driver is useless after the setup where you'd need the actual Windows-based driver.

There are quite a lot of SATA controllers out there these days, and even though Vista has a lot of the necessary drivers as of when it went RTM in early November, it obviously doesn't have them all.

Another thing is that the basic SATA compatibility driver might be kicking in in this case to get the files copied over, but after that first stage of the installation the Windows-based driver isn't there or up to date and so, you get a dead machine.

I just made a posting in another thread that will offer some tips on how to get this resolved. That posting is here:

http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1030603863&postcount=34

While the other info about testing is sortakinda relevant (so you can test if this is the real cause), you're going to need to find the latest SATA controller drivers and put them on the floppy, CD/DVD, or USB thumbdrive as mentioned in that posting.

Good luck...
 
Dark_Eternal said:
Is your SATA drive set to your first boot drive in the BIOS after the CD/DVD drive? If that is the case then that leads me to believe that your SATA is going bad. I have vista installed on 2 raptor drives in RAID 0 and have had no issues.
Click to expand...

Looking at your sig you've got a solid Intel machine through and through: Intel processor, Intel chipset, Intel SATA controllers. Microsoft and Intel are like two peas in a pod in that respect, and any version of Windows will always have full compatibility with every piece of Intel hardware on the market the day the OS goes RTM.

That's why I only build strictly Intel machines: this driver crap is never an issue, ever, unlike it is with other varieties of chipsets like VIA, Nvidia, ATI, and heaven forbid, SiS, as well as all the lesser known companies making SATA controller chipsets nowadays also.

Intel ftw!!!
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Looking at your sig you've got a solid Intel machine through and through: Intel processor, Intel chipset, Intel SATA controllers. Microsoft and Intel are like two peas in a pod in that respect, and any version of Windows will always have full compatibility with every piece of Intel hardware on the market the day the OS goes RTM.
Intel ftw!!!
Click to expand...

Actually, my board has a VIA chipset. But I agree on the intel statement, my previous P4 system had an Intel chipset and it was rock solid.
 
Damn, sorry I missed that. I was under the impression that all the ASRock boards for Intel stuff were all Intel. Guess that keeps me from buying one... yikes... :(
 
Thank you for the replies! I will have to try the latest driver on a thumb drive since I do not have a Floppy.

But I believe i had this same problem with XP also. Would try to install it on the SATA drive and would get the same thing. I will get on that and let ya'll know what happens. Again thank you!
 
You can't use a USB drive for drivers under XP, only under Vista.

Under XP you have two options:

1) Use the drivers on a floppy, or...

2) Create a new custom burned XP installation CD with the drivers already integrated. I wrote a guide recently teaching people how to do that, so if you need it or more info, just ask.
 
I have the same motherboard as you with only SATA hard drives, I bought one specifically to use as an installation to Vista Ultimate (Full version). I was going to dual boot between Windows XP and Vista. I would get to the point in which Vista would reboot after the initial install but I couldn't for the life of me why it didn't go through after that. It kept telling me it couldn't find the windows folder, etc.

Since I was dual booting I had to use the previous boot drive as the first drive since Vista installs boot data on it. Still no go. Upgraded to the last BIOS, took all hard drives out except the installation hard drive, checked to see if all 4 SATA ports were on in BIOS, nothing worked.

After a hectic weekend I decided to just split my windows XP hard drive, and install Vista on that. It works perfectly now. But I have misgivings of have two OS's on one hard drive.

Please let us know if you do get a solution. I might have to try it.
 
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