Geeks, I'm stuck...

I built a new machine on an 875 MB from Gigabyte (won it at angrygravy.com lan party)

with a 3.0 Ghz. 512 MB cache 800Mhz FSB chip
512 MB ram - one stick so no dual channel
an 80 GB SATA HD
CD rom, blah, blah

so my issue is when I try and install XP (real, not burned) the install loops. It sees the HD, formats the HD, copies files and then on the the reboot it starts over with the CD install. I thought that was kinda weird, but did it again and then took the CD out, and it says NO OS. So I thought maybe my boot order? CD-ROM, HD but changed it to HD, and then CD-ROM and it does the same thing. Bad CD maybe? Tried my Windows 2000 Disk, and it does the same thing.

Any ideas?

nick@angrygravy.com

 

Do you have serial ata drivers on a floppy?

You usually need them to install XP on a SATA drive.

When you boot off of the CD, press F6 when prompted.

 

I agree with Adrynalyne. It is most likely an SATA issue. Beware, though, the "prompt" he's talking about is easy to miss. It's at the very begining when it's still loading files for setup, and it gives you no feedback that you've pressed it until much later. It's quite annoying.

 

Yeah, I have tried installing the SATA drivers, although I guess I am not sure that I have the correct ones. The Gigatech website doesn't help much either. Anyone have the Gigabyte GA-81875 Board?

 

I assume you mean GA-8I875? According to your motherboard's manual, in order to boot to the SATA drives, you must set the boot device to "SCSI," not "HDD-0".

The drive you want is the RAID driver listed here. Specifically, you want the one labelled "Diskfile for O.S. installation". I'm not sure why they have 3.5 and 3.0 listed. I would make sure that your BIOS is up-to-date, or you can be brave and just go with 3.5.

 

3.0 appears to be for windows 2000
3.5 apperas to be for XP or 2000

The raid drivers you need can also be found on the CD that came with your MOBO, drivers must be extracted, unzipped, applied to floppy,
I believe download from web site, would be too big for floppy, if is the case save to desktop, extract, unzip, apply to floppy.

Gigabyte seem to lack imformation when comes to sata's, They could certainly make it eaiser.
If needed thier Customer service/ Tech staff seems to be pretty good if you need to contact them, last time I emailed I recieved response with in 48hrs

 

Well, yeah, I gathered that. And 3.0 is only for XP, not 2000. That's why it makes no sense. If they're truly interchangable, then there should be no reason for the 3.0 drivers to be on the site at all. My best guess is that they updated the BIOS of the SATA RAID controller when they did a mainboard BIOS revision (seen it before) so the previous version exists to support the old BIOS. But they never say that, and there's no readme file, so I can't be sure.

That's why you have to download the one labelled "Floppy for O.S. Installation". They're only 0.15 MB, and should quite easily fit on a floppy.

 

Opp's
I guess the key word was (appears), I guess my memory not so good.
Thanks for correction Da chicken! ( What would we do, without Da chicken)

Also note, on that MOBO CD there should be read me file with sata instructions.

Here's alittle tidbit from my Gigibyte sata board (different MOBO 7VT600 1394), loading Win 2000 on my sata, I had to load SATA drivers for XP, funny thing the 2000 drivers would'nt work,


I pulled out a few hairs before, got my rig running. I'm running dual boot with XP now, The SATA is slightly faster than ATA 133 HDD same speed.
Had so much trouble locating correct drivers once found maid several copies, just in case!

SOME THING's NEVER MAKE SENSE!

 

Agreed, their documentation sucks. I also found some pinout errors in the manual on their USB connections. Anyway... I have fixed the issue, it wasn't that I wasn't loading the correct drivers, or the BIOS was set wrong. The floppy drive that I was making the disk was on bad, how odd is that? Once I made the disk on another machine it worked great. The floppy drive that I have keeps trying to format every disk I put in, but if I use it on another floppy drive it works... anyway, floppy drive is replaced, machine is built and working great. Thanks for your help guys!