Setting up XP on MSI PT880 NEO motherboard

[Guest]

I built a system using an MSI PT880 NEO motherboard. Other details:

Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz
1 GB RAM (2x512) PC 3200
ATI Radeon 9250 AGP card
USB/1394 PCI card
Two 250GB PATA hard disks (one is UDMA 133 and the other is 100) running in
master/slave configuration.

AMIBIOS A7043 VMS, ver 1.6 092404

I modified the BIOS to boot up from the CD drive, and inserted the Windows
XP Pro setup CD in it Version 2002, which includes SP1). I get the message,
press any key to boot from CD, and
when I do, I see the message: Setup is examining hardware, and nothing else
happens (cursor disappears). I waited about 15 minutes, and repeated the
process with no luck. Any ideas?

PS: The hardware is working fine. I have a Fedora Linux CD set and tried it,
it installed fine on this system. Obviously, I'm interested in making the XP
setup work

 

[Guest]

I built a system using an MSI PT880 NEO motherboard. Other details:

Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz
1 GB RAM (2x512) PC 3200
ATI Radeon 9250 AGP card
USB/1394 PCI card
Two 250GB PATA hard disks (one is UDMA 133 and the other is 100) running in
master/slave configuration.

AMIBIOS A7043 VMS, ver 1.6 092404

I modified the BIOS to boot up from the CD drive, and inserted the Windows
XP Pro setup CD in it Version 2002, which includes SP1). I get the message,
press any key to boot from CD, and
when I do, I see the message: Setup is examining hardware, and nothing else
happens (cursor disappears). I waited about 15 minutes, and repeated the
process with no luck. Any ideas?

PS: The hardware is working fine. I have a Fedora Linux CD set and tried it,
it installed fine on this system. Obviously, I'm interested in making the XP
setup work

Joseph, I just went through a similar install with an ABIT NF7 and two WD
HDD. I'm sorry, I don't know what "P"ATA is but these were just UDMA ATA
drives. The master was 100 and the slave 133. (They were old leftovers) I
had the exact same symptom. I tried a couple scenarios and ended up not
using the slave 100 drive. Everything went fine with just the 80 GB 133
drive. You should also make sure your BIOS version supports 250GB, if you
haven't already. Good luck

 

[Guest]

The problem turned out to be Linux. I took the drives out, re-formatted them
under XP in another PC, and re-tried the install, and this time it installed
fine. I am however running into a different problem. Once setup is done, the
PC starts Windows OK. Next I run the setup CD that came with the motherboard.
It installs the VIA (880) chipset drivers, and at this point XP recognizes
the video card, and the LAN chipset, etc. The system reboots and instead of
seeing the Windows slapsh screen, I am now looking at a blinking cursor in
the leftmost upper corner of the screen. Soft boot / Cold boot produces the
same results.

PATA means Parallel ATA (standard IDE drives) as opposed to the new Serial
ATA drives.

Microsoft should account for a Linux formatted drive in the system and offer
to format it using NTFS (just as Linux detects NTFS drives and offers to
format using other formats).