Gigabyte mobo replacement; SATA drive restarts...
I have a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard, and I've been using a Seagate Barracuda SATA drive since the mobo's first install-- AMD processor (2600+, Barton core). I never had any problems with this setup, but recently the motherboard failed due to a dripping CPU waterblock. I got a replacement MB that's the same model (albeit rev.2), hooked everything back up, and since then have not been able to get the SATA drive to boot properly. It will go through all of the normal startup routines, all the way to where the windows splash screen should show-- but then it force-restarts. Sometimes it flashes (and I mean FLASHES-- less than 1/5th of a second) the "hard drive problem" blue screen message; but I only know that's what it says by videotaping and freeze-framing it.
I've read many of the other threads about problems with this board and SATA drivers, but none of them seem to deal directly with my particular problem of having a good HDD, good WinXP install, and valuable data on the drive without being able to get "all the way there". I thought I might post and ask for help, as this is the best support advice I've seen anywhere. Any suggestions short of using a plain IDE HDD to bring up the machine and recovering my data before a fresh install would be greatly appreciated. I did see somewhere that I should NOT try installing XP over my existing instance of it, so I won't do that-- it just seems that there's something I'm missing that should allow me to get back to where I was without so much jumping through hoops...
To reiterate-- no changes have been made excepting the MB replacement, no components took damage (confirmed by testing) except the MB itself-- what's keeping me out?
Thank you very much for any help on this...
Isarmann
(1st post!)
I've read many of the other threads about problems with this board and SATA drivers, but none of them seem to deal directly with my particular problem of having a good HDD, good WinXP install, and valuable data on the drive without being able to get "all the way there". I thought I might post and ask for help, as this is the best support advice I've seen anywhere. Any suggestions short of using a plain IDE HDD to bring up the machine and recovering my data before a fresh install would be greatly appreciated. I did see somewhere that I should NOT try installing XP over my existing instance of it, so I won't do that-- it just seems that there's something I'm missing that should allow me to get back to where I was without so much jumping through hoops...
To reiterate-- no changes have been made excepting the MB replacement, no components took damage (confirmed by testing) except the MB itself-- what's keeping me out?
Thank you very much for any help on this...
Isarmann
(1st post!)
0
Comments
Meaning that you did not do a clean install with this motherboard (rev 1.2).
Yes, that's it-- I was hoping to get away with it because it's the same hardware. Incidentally, I didn't realize that the motherboard had been revised until I had already installed it-- but even with that knowledge, it seemed that a mere revision (which I figured would be mostly a firmware sort of thing) wouldn't be such a fundamental difference as to preclude using my previous XP install...
I take it from your question that a new install WILL be required? That's unfortunate, but not the end of the world-- my only concern then is how can I best affect such an install without damaging the other (non-windows) data that is stored on this drive? Can you give me a procedure?
Thanks for the help...
Isarmann