New Installation to SATA disks

[tony]

Hi All,

I have a new system with an AMD 3500 processor on a MSI K8N mobo and 2
maxtor SATA drives.
I am having trouble installing windows.
I originally didn't realise that I needed to install the SATA drivers from
floppy during the initial setup but windows still found the drives and tried
to format them. This format failed.
I have since tried to install XP using the SATA drivers at F6 which it seems
to do but now when the drivers have all been installed the screen changes to
"Setup is starting windows" it hangs.
Any idea what I am doing wrong?
I am using a slipstreamed Xp disk with SP2, it has worked successfully on
other installs.

Thanks

Tony

 

[Guest]

Hello Tony,

I also have a new MSI K8N-Neo2 mobo and have a pair of Western Digital
Raptor drives attached to the first two SATA controllers. I have been playing
with various installation scenarios and have not had any problems with XP pro.

From your post it sounds like you might have your two drives defined as an
array of some kind. In this case, when installing Windows, and after
pressing F6 to load the drivers from the supplied diskette, you will see that
Windows lists two device drivers in the selection window. You must load BOTH
of these drivers for the NVRAID subsystem to function. So, after pressing "S"
and selecting the "NVRAID" driver, press "S" again and select the "NV ATA
Bus" driver as well.

Another possibility is that the Driver diskette itself could be corrupt. You
can refresh the driver disk from the MSI installation CD. Have a look at the
back of the MSI manual, in the section on NVRAID, and you will find
instructions on making a new diskette from the CD.

As I said, in my case I have tried installing Windows to the SATA drives
both natively, and as an NVRAID set. In both cases the installation went
smoothly and Windows ran OK.

Good Luck,
Trevor.

 

[tony]

Hello Tony,

I also have a new MSI K8N-Neo2 mobo and have a pair of Western Digital
Raptor drives attached to the first two SATA controllers. I have been
playing
with various installation scenarios and have not had any problems with XP
pro.

From your post it sounds like you might have your two drives defined as an
array of some kind. In this case, when installing Windows, and after
pressing F6 to load the drivers from the supplied diskette, you will see
that
Windows lists two device drivers in the selection window. You must load
BOTH
of these drivers for the NVRAID subsystem to function. So, after pressing
"S"
and selecting the "NVRAID" driver, press "S" again and select the "NV ATA
Bus" driver as well.

Another possibility is that the Driver diskette itself could be corrupt.
You
can refresh the driver disk from the MSI installation CD. Have a look at
the
back of the MSI manual, in the section on NVRAID, and you will find
instructions on making a new diskette from the CD.

As I said, in my case I have tried installing Windows to the SATA drives
both natively, and as an NVRAID set. In both cases the installation went
smoothly and Windows ran OK.

Good Luck,
Trevor.

Thanks Trevor,

After a lot of messing about I found on the MSI discussions site an article
where they recommend connecting to the 3rd and 4th SATA connectors, why they
don't say. I would have thought that it would work on 1 & 2 but there we
are!
I connected as they advise and tried to install XP again using the drivers
on the floppy and I got the BSOD with a stop msg at the point that setup
hung.
As an experiment I tried to install without the drivers, it WORKED with the
generic XP drivers.
I have had it running now for some 5 hours and so far it is OK.
Another strange bit of advice from that group was to only have 1 strip of
memory installed while installing XP.
Oh! well!, it works,

Thanks once again,

Tony