Hell on a motherboard

[sChitZ]

Hi guys, my names Andy and I am a self proclaimed newb of computing in general, please do groan when you read this and skip to the next thread, as this will either give you a headache, or you will laugh at the simplicity of it. Ok specs first-

P4 3.0ghz,
512mb RAM Samsung PC3200,
Abit Guru A17 Motherboard,
Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb,
Samsung 80gb SATA 133 HDD.

Basically ive bought all these parts myself and built it from scratch with no problems whatsoever. So i boot up, go into the bios and enable my on board SATA controller. Save. Restart and boot up my windows CD, i then obviously installed the drivers for my RAID, created a partition and format. All is good, until the Blue Screen of Death appears :banghead:. Now its page file error, that ive searched on the net, and can seem to get no sense from anywhere, some people say its my RAM, some say the HDD is fecked, but others say its my drivers for my RAID, and how its set up in my BIOS. Now i know for a fact the RAM is fine as i connected the IDE HDD from this comp, which booted straight away, and i seriously doubt its the HDD, but these bloody drivers, what the hell is going on?

I the preceded to methodically try loads of different settings in the BIOS to no avail, i tried running the SATA in IDE mode. Nope. In Raid. Nope. Changing the IRQ number thingys, and i still get the error message each time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, :)

sChitZ

[Armo]

the thing is u should need to install the SATA drivers unless ur pluged into a sata port thats part of a raid controlled port, ehich by the look of the mobo specs it is. even though its on a raid port i would at least try to install windows with out the raid drivers. usually the BSOD results in a malfunctioning driver. see if it will install windows with out the raid driver

i use sata on my MSI board and i run it in Native + SATA i belive it is i suppose its EIDE and SATA but im not positive.

[Gobbles]

I would first reset the bios back to base. I would then find out what bios revision I am using and see if there is newer bios that may address this issue. I would also make sure that I am using the latest drivers.

Does the blue screen occur during the installation?
Does it always occur in the same spot?
Are you using a burned cd? if so have you tried the original?

Just some things to consider. Also for a self proclaimed noob, you seem to have a firm grasp on the topic. Cudos.

[JChretien]

I've heard LOTS of problems with the Silicon images SATA controller and Samsung HDDs... there are threads all over the boards about them -_- maybe you should check those out ^^

[sChitZ]

Thanks for the quick reply guys,

Armo what do you mean by "..plugged into SATA port of a Raid controller", all i have done basically is plugged the HDD into the SATA 1 port on my motherboard. Ive read up a bit on Raid itself, but it doesnt really apply to me as im only running the 1 drive, so I firstly set it up as an IDE based drive (dunno the proper term) which failed, and then I tried running it as a Raid, which gave me the exact same error.

Gobbles, ive also read up about flashing my bios, but to be honest I dont feel confident enough to do it, but there is definately an upgrade available for it. The blue screens themselves vary between 3, one is the Page Fault in non paged area, the other just tells me theres an error (well duh..) and the other is Driver IRQL is not less or equal to ndis.sys. Ive only had the latter one once. The actual blue screen itself only appears in the windows setup (XP Pro- backuped disc), after all the drivers are load, and before i can choose to partition, format.. etc. It always and only happens at this spot. And i am a noob, a few hours of looking around this forum, verified it :P.

Finally JChretien, I have searched, and searched for threads about this, but cannot find any, if you know of one post the link, greatly appreciated.

sChitZ

[Armo]

what i ment was that not all ( cept for ur mobo ) sata ports are controlled for halndaling raid configurations.

have you tried windows setup with out installing the raid drivers?