ASUS A8NSLI, maxtor 200gig Won't Boot

abrogardabrogard
edited March 2006 in Hardware
New system. Came to me with a blank HDD.
ASUS A8NSLI, maxtor 200gig SATA, Athlon64,Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO.

I booted off a win98 floppy and fdisked a partition of 25% of the HDD.

Then I formatted it /s and saw that the system was transferred - or, at least, command.com was written to the c: drive.

The BIOS has boot sequence HDD, floppy, CDROM.

The partition is active.

When I reboot the machine hangs after doing the PCI device detect.

It did precisely that before I did anything at all to it - i.e. when the HDD was unpartitioned and unformatted.

I had planned to boot off the c: drive into a win98 skeletal system and use it to copy I386 off my XP disk and then install XP from off the C: drive.

Regardless of OS's I need some answer to this. How to boot off the C: drive?

The BIOS is: SiI 3114 sataraid bios 5.1.39 1997-2004 silicon image, inc.

Any help much appreciated.

regards,

ab :)

Comments

  • skankinredskankinred
    edited March 2006
    I'm not sure I understood what you said completely.
    Are jumper settings correct on HD?

    What is PCI device check? I don't remember ever seeing that in bios bootup. Is it freezing on IDE device check? When exactly is the pc freezing? After the bios bootup completes and immediately at HD bootup? During bios bootup? After HD bootup starts?

    Have you tried resetting bios setting to default fail safe mode?
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    problem #1, Win98 cant exactly regicnize diks larger than 134GB.

    problem #2, that machine has no OS on the hdd which is why it just sits there.

    problem #3, fdisk and format.exe can only format into FAT32 which is a waste of space on a drive that big.

    problem #4, you do NOT what it install 98 and then upgrade to XP, trust me ive done it before :)

    what you need to do is find a XP CD, and set the CD-Rom as the first boot device. when your machine cranks up it will ask you to "press any key to boot from cd-rom..." when you do it kicks off XP install which is really simple ( more so than Fdisk )

    the XP setup will allow you to partition, format, quick format ( formats the 1st million and last million clusters of a partition - good for a new drive ) using Fat32 ( ewww ) or NTFS ( yay! )

    you have the makings of a really nice system, you just dont want to clog it up by installing 98 and then upgrading.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited March 2006
    Win98 cant exactly regicnize diks larger than 134GB.
    I've never tried Win98 on mine! :hair:
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    if i remember correctly it has thee same drive size restriction as XP SP1 or what ever it was at 137 GB
  • abrogardabrogard
    edited March 2006
    Thank you guys.

    The machine freezes after what it calls 'PCI device listing'.

    If I put a win98 floppy in there it doesn't freeze at that point, it boots.
    Into win98, floppy based, from where I can see the Maxtor, properly described and I can write to the C: drive and I can see Command.com sitting there.

    I'll try what you say, Armo. Thanks for the encouraging words about my system. It's the best computer I've ever owned. I put it together from the 'best buys' of a good, technical computer magazine here (pcauthority) but it didn't cover compatibility issues for these different things.

    I don't have previous experience of this kind of stuff - SATA, SLI, the better video cards, and whatever.

    You might be interested in advice I got from another source:

    Stay away from the SI3114. Its evil. In fact, just disable it. Place the single drive on the Nforce controller. Specify it as the single and first boot drive in the bios. Take it from there. There should be no further issues. I have installed a DiamondMax10 before and run WinXP perfectly.

    I don't understand it.

    regards,

    ab :)
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    i have the same board as you so i know its awesome :)

    the SI3114 is the silicon image 3114 raid controler. its the 4 red ports on the motherboard. they support sata one drives in raid configureations of:

    raid 0 - 2 or more drives storing all data striped accros them all, zero fault tolerence, you loose one drive you loos all data on all of them.

    raid 1 - 2 or more drives with complete mirror data on both sets of drives. one drive failes the machine automaticly starts using the other set of drives.

    raid 5 - best fualt tolerence per $. 3 or more drives, uses one whole drive for parity. one drive dies, it uses the parity information to continue normal opertation, simply replace the failed drive and it will rebuild all the data that was on the broken drive by using the pairty information

    the SI3114 is a really crappy raid 5 controler, its console runs through java, which is to day not my favorite programing language, very nice if done correctly.

    i ran a 4 disk raid 5 off of it for a while, but i came to the conclusion: if the controler on the board fails - i loose all of my data.

    i fully support turning the SI3114 controler off in the bios if you decide not to do raid at this time, besides the NF4 chipset can do raid too. raid 0 and raid 1



    its always a good idea to keep a CD-ROM device as the first boot device, unless you are totally worried about the time it takes to laod into windows.
  • abrogardabrogard
    edited March 2006
    Thanks Armo,

    It was ridiculously easy. There was no problem at all, really, was there? I just thought there was.

    Booted from my CD XP and it installed XP and we're off and running. I'm responding to you now on that machine.

    But that's interesting and valuable about the RAID. I'm not into it yet but I'll get there and meantime I'll turn off the SI3114 as you say.

    Another dumb question betraying my level of knowledge: Should I run the video card installation disk or has Windows XP already installed the correct drivers?

    regards, and thanks again,

    ab :)
  • skankinredskankinred
    edited March 2006
    Always download latest drivers from manufacturers website. Even if you bought it brand new, by the time you get the product, the cd is outdated.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    skankinred wrote:
    Always download latest drivers from manufacturers website. Even if you bought it brand new, by the time you get the product, the cd is outdated.

    bingo!

    you will want to install all of the software that came with the motherboard ( its called somthing like nForce 4 instalation CD or somthing liek that. that installs all of your drivers for like USB, network, sound, stuff like that, but you'll want to go to www.ati.com and download the latest drivers
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