Windows Installation + SATA Problem

SPARTAN VI

SPARTAN VI

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Jun 12, 2004
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Good morning,

A buddy of mine and I both jumped on the Q6600 (G0) deal at Fry's this past week and he's ordered the exact same parts that I did for our builds. Only difference is he's using a new harddrive whereas I'm just taking my harddrives from my old system. No problems with my build, but we're having trouble getting WindowsXP/Vista installed on his.

His rig is almost identical to my own:
Intel C2Q Q6600 (G0)
GA-P35-DS3L
4GB G.Skill DDR2-1000
Mushkin 550W PSU
GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
WD 160GB Cavier SATA HDD

When he attempts to install WindowsXP, it formats the drive, installs part of Windows, reboots, then doesn't complete the installation. Just goes into an endless rebooting cycle.

When we tried it on an PATA HDD that already had WindowsXP installed, it just spit out "disk read errors."

We tried tinkering with the bios, enabling AHCI, disabling AHCI, no luck.

Went back to the SATA drive and attempted to install Windows Vista Home Premium (Upgrade) using the clean install trick. But even then it couldn't find his SATA drive, either with AHCI enabled/disabled.

Our motherboards don't come with the traditional floppy disk with SATA drivers on them, so we weren't able to go through the F6 option on the WinXP installation like I'm accustomed to.

I did some reading about using nLite and slipstreaming, but haven't entirely read up on the work around. Wondering if this is the fix we're looking for though.

Any suggestions?
 
Try a bios update, both boards could have been shipped out from differently dated stock, with different bios revisions.

I would suspect a faulty motherboard, DOA :(

I also read, in some other threads here, some users complaining about the Gigabyte motherboards and some sort of double booting, rebooting cycle issues with quad core cpus. I don't remember the details, try looking around for it :(
 
SPARTAN VI said:
Our motherboards don't come with the traditional floppy disk with SATA drivers on them, so we weren't able to go through the F6 option on the WinXP installation like I'm accustomed to.

I did some reading about using nLite and slipstreaming, but haven't entirely read up on the work around. Wondering if this is the fix we're looking for though.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

You can make your own disk, but you may not need to since it wouldn't even begin to install without drivers.

Check the boot order in BIOS to make sure that it will boot from a SATA drive.
 
Menelmarar said:
Try a bios update, both boards could have been shipped out from differently dated stock, with different bios revisions.

I would suspect a faulty motherboard, DOA :(

I also read, in some other threads here, some users complaining about the Gigabyte motherboards and some sort of double booting, rebooting cycle issues with quad core cpus. I don't remember the details, try looking around for it :(
Click to expand...

I think both of our boards shipped with the F7 bios, I updated mine to F8b once I got my rig up.

Double booting.. I think I heard bits and pieces about that when sniffing around [H] for a solution. Take a closer look at that.

dhc014 said:
You can make your own disk, but you may not need to since it wouldn't even begin to install without drivers.

Check the boot order in BIOS to make sure that it will boot from a SATA drive.
Click to expand...

I thought about making the disk, the MB's CD has SATA drivers on it. I just don't have a floppy drive anymore. May have to borrow his floppy drive, make the disk, then take the floppy drive back out and put it in his rig. :p

And yes, the bios does see the his SATA drive in the load order. I've tried switching it around using different SATA slots at one point.
 
Go into yr bios and for the settings for your hard disks if it says "RAID" change it to "IDE".

That will work.
 
Well, went through the bios and there's no setting like that. Vista sees mine just fine, doesn't want anything to do with his.
 
So I got some confirmation on my theory: computers are voodoo. An offering of your first born's blood is more likely to resolve a problem (sooner) than hours of troubleshooting. Don't know what did it, but I tried reinstalling WinXP for the 4th time, and if it didn't work, we were going to RMA the harddrive.. AND the little fucker took the install. Working fine. What a huge headache for no reason.
 
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