Vista Ultimate x86 or x64 will not install to SATA drives - ok to IDE

B

BobS

Subject line states the problem and before anyone suggests that I need to
install the SATA drivers during the install process - I have. Have tried
both the 32 and 64 bit drivers.

Hardware:

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athalon X2
2Gb memory
WDC Raptor 74Gb 10Krpm drives on SATA (x2)
Seagate EIDE drives (x2)
GeForce 6800 graphic cards (x2)

During install, Vista does install to the SATA drive but when it goes to
first boot, it reboots then comes up to a black screen - no error messages.
I believe Vista is not recognizing the SATA drives (Sil 3132 SATA controller
on Asus mb) even though the drivers were loaded during the install process.

Have tried both the 32 and 64 bit Vista installs using the correct SATA
drivers and even without installing the SATA drivers during the install
process, I get the same result.

Now I'm thinking it's Vista not recognizing the SATA drives because if I
load Vista to a standard EIDE drive - it works just fine. When I look at
the system, Vista does not see the SATA drives until after you do the first
update and it does download a Sil 3132 update. Then it finds all the SATA
drives.

So even though the drivers are loaded up-front, Vista doesn't appear to
"retain" them. I've done numerous clean installs and dual boot scenarios
and it's the same story - blank screen after first reboot, no error
messages. I've reformatted the drive used to install Vista after each
attempt.

I've checked all the manf sites for info and I haven't read about anyone
else here not being able to load to SATA drives.

One thing I haven't tried is pulling an ATI TV tuner card I have installed.
I would think it would just come up as an unknown device and press on, but
then again.

Any suggestions short of booting this thing into next week........;-)

Thanks,

Bob S.
 
G

Guest

Unplug the two EIDE drives until you are done with the installation.
Plug them later on.
I could not get Vista to install (ASUS A8N-SLI) on my two SATA raid0 disks
because of the presence of a third SATA (non raid disk).
I experimented your very same problems on reboot.
Unplugged the SATA disk, proceeded with install, plugged the SATA disk.
Carlos
 
B

BobS

Carlos,

Good idea and I'll try that shortly. Funny thing is WinXP Pro can be
installed to a SATA drive - no problem....

I'll do a follow-up post.

Thanks,

Bob S.
 
D

Dale Mad_Murdock White

Actually, I had the same problem. I had 1 EIDE drive and the rest were SATA,
but Vista would never install. Turns out, I had the same problem when I
re-install XP with SP2 integrated. In both cases, unplugging the 1 IDE drive
worked fine.

On a side note, I did have 2 IDE drives that went through a Promise Fast
track 2000 card, and those did not cause the problem. Just the 1 drive on
the MoBo's EIDE controler
 
B

BobS

Dale Mad_Murdock White said:
Actually, I had the same problem. I had 1 EIDE drive and the rest were
SATA, but Vista would never install. Turns out, I had the same problem
when I re-install XP with SP2 integrated. In both cases, unplugging the 1
IDE drive worked fine.

On a side note, I did have 2 IDE drives that went through a Promise Fast
track 2000 card, and those did not cause the problem. Just the 1 drive on
the MoBo's EIDE controler

Well I'm at a loss as to why I can't get Vista to run on a SATA drive. Had
the system minimized down to only 2 SATA drives, one with WinXP Pro on it,
the other for Vista. Goes thru all the motions (no error codes) and says it
completed the install then reboots - and black screen after that.

Turned everything off in the BIOS that I could (and still run) disconnected
cables and power from the other drives, have the latest Asus BIOS (1303),
latest Sil 3132 SATA drivers for both 32/64 bit versions and it loads them
in fine. Obviously Vista installer can work with the SATA drives since
that's all that was connected besides the DVD drive.

Reconfiguring the system and I'll reload Vista 64 on a spare EIDE drive
(dual-boot) so I can get it up and running so I can start checking what
programs will or will not run. Anyone got the MS phone number handy? I'm
sure there's about a 2 hour hold (minimum).......

Thanks for your suggestions,

Bob S.
 
D

Dale M. White

Well, your problem is definately something else. Mine was at teh Pick a
drive to isntall screen. No matter what drive I picked, it would tell me
that drive was not acceptable to Vista. XP would just hang at the drive
options.
 
B

BobS

Carlos said:
Carlos,

That is an interesting find and I'll give it a go - latter. Right now the
system is in the final throws of loading the x64 version onto an EIDE drive.
Sure has been a couple of long days with Vista but I've learned quite a bit.
I'm sure there will be some more patches and updates from all the vendors
just to make it even more interesting.I think I have tried just about every
variation/combination that there is. Even made Vista backup recovery
images - works fine.

Oh boy.....the message..."please wait while windows prepares to start for
the first time" just popped up on the other system - we now have "completing
upgrade" and we now have a bit of a wait....

This works fine on the EIDE so for now we're gonna be up and running Vista
x64 even though it's not on one of the Raptor drives.

Now if you can just find me a little magic SATA dust to sprinkle on this box
we'll be in business. Thank you for your help it is greatly appreciated. I
think you nailed the problem I suspected but couldn't prove.

Bob S.
 
G

Guest

Bob, I have the same problem you did with black screen.
When you successfully installed Vista on the EIDE, did you install through
XP or as a bootup?

I know if I try to do the bootup, it has "loading Windows Files" and
progress bar then goes to black screen on any single drive (EIDE or SATA)
hooked up. Only furthest was installing in XP, then it rebooted and went to
black after the dual boot menu. Black for both trying to boot to XP and
Vista.

Wanted to know if you got it to work only installing on EIDE through XP,
before I waste another couple of hours clearing out an old drive.
Thanks.
 
D

Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White

Oh No ! I even let Vista delete the partition and format it. For whatever
reason, no matter what drive I picked, if the IDE drive was plugged into the
MOBO, it wouldn't allow me to install vista
 
B

BobS

chinolam said:
Bob, I have the same problem you did with black screen.
When you successfully installed Vista on the EIDE, did you install through
XP or as a bootup?

I've done it both ways - several times making hardware changes along the way
and taking notes. But.... stopped taking notes after many configuration
changes. I was doing this on a minimized hardware configuration and was not
getting any differences. So I turned everything back on in the BIOS and
installed all my drives (4x SATA, 2x EIDE, 2xDVD's). Did an image recovery
of WinXP since I had glitched it - or Vista did but at any rate, got back to
an original configuration - fully loaded box with WinXP Pro on a SATA drive.

All my install attempts were to seperate drive whether it was a SATA or EIDE
drive, I did not want to partition on a Raptor 74Gb drive with XP. So I
installed anothe Raptor that was intended just for Vista 32 bit version and
yet another Raptor to be used for testing x64 version. I'm testing with the
upgrade version of Vista Ultimate - signature edition (hey it was the last
one on the shelf at Best Buy for the same price as the peon version...;-)

1. The attempt to place Vista on a SATA drive with the 32 bit version of
Vista - upgrading WinXP - mangled WinXP after the install did not work and I
selected the rollback option - not a good choice upon reflection.....
Re-imaged the drive - back to square one....

2. The next attempt was same hardware but this time using the 64 bit
version. You cannot do an upgrade and must do a clean install. This didn't
work either - black screen. Did the rollback - it glitched the bootloader,
I re-imaged the drive - back to square one. Starting to see a trend here?

3. Same configuration, clean install this time by booting from the DVD and
loading it onto the EIDE drive connected to IDE 0. Worked fine and I had a
dual-boot system.

4. Cleaned that out - back to square one. Pulled the WinXP SATA drive and
reformatted the Vista drive. Clean machine - no operating system installed.
Did the boot DVD thing, using the clean install method of loading Vista over
itself (second load) and that worked.

Now between each of those major tests - were a number of minor variations on
hardware and whether I used WinXP or not. Essentially, for testing purposes
(and not entering product key) you can treat the upgrade package as a full
version if you want to do a clean install - which is all you can do if
you're using the 64 bit version. Then do an in-place upgrade from Vista and
load the product key on the second load. I tried this several times - works
fine and it retains all the stuff I did to Vista on the 1st load (clean
install) to the final (in-place) upgrade using Vista.

Did I do all the possible variations ? No, I did not upgrade WinXP using
the 32 bit version of Vista from within WinXP but I did do the clean install
from within WinXP and made a dual-boot system. Now before anyone jumps on
me saying that's not allowed (legally) there's lot's going for it (and much
discussion) and there's nothing in the EULA - against it. You can use only
one operating system at a time, the Vista install routines allow it (it's a
choice) and the install routines do not disable WinXP. I'm sure this will
be a point of contention with someone but MS made the rules and I, like many
others, just did what the program offered up. No cheating work-arounds, no
fraud, paid my money and bought the full family option too.

As with any new OS and being an early adopter, there's going to be trials
and tribulations. I knew that and have been learning a lot too. Even some
of the MSVP's are stumped on a lot of the issues and there's conflicting
information coming from MS. Hell - there's even wrong product keys being
given out by MS. Just got another notice and new product keys for the
additional licensses I purchased. Overall, I like what I've seen so far of
Vista (bugs not withstanding) and in due course all the responsible vendors
will get their drivers fixed - or loose market share. Can't wait to see all
the new shareware and freeware applications that this will generate! Might
even write one or two myself (now where is that old book on assembly
language coding anyway...)

Bob S.
 
T

TehJumpingJawa

I have an Asus K8N mobo, and am having the exact same problem (blank
screen with flashing cursor after reboot) after installing Vista
Ultimate OEM onto a maxtor 200gig SATA drive. (clean install from the
DVD, only other drive attached is the dvd rom from which I am
installing)

This is the first time I’ve bothered to buy a licensed copy of
windows.... and will likely be the last. :mad:

Does anyone know exactly what is going wrong? or even better how to
fix it!
Is Vista failing to create a correct mbr on the sata drive?

[edit]

I have just tried installing Vista onto my 300gig pata drive
instead...
It still fails in the same place (when trying to boot from the HD,
after first reboot), but gives an error this time:-
"A disk read error occured
press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

The repair functionality available when booting from the DVD doesn’t
find anything wrong, and I can explore the file system of the drive
Vista is installed onto just fine. (as I could when it was installed
on the SATA drive)

I’m beginning to think Vista doesn’t work correctly with the ata
controller used on my mobo??? (XP SP1 CD worked fine, never tried
installing direct from an SP2 CD)
The mobo is flashed to the latest available firmware (Rev. 1011 Beta
005), and the rest of my system is pretty standard :-

Athlon 64 3000+,
Asus K8N,
2gb ddr,
GeForce 6800GT 256mb.

One observation that might be a sign of something more serious being
screwed/incompatible; during the Vista installation at several points
the machine appears to lock-up for upto 3 minutes with no visual
feedback of progress. (the mouse cursor still moves though)
The freezes occur;
1) when the installation screen background first appears (the blue
vertical wavey pattern)
2) after entering the product key
3) the dialog for selecting which Vista installation you wish to
repair (when performing a repair.)
 
B

BobS

I made a follow-up post as to the root cause for my problem. Short version:

Get a copy of FDISK, put it on a bootable floppy and FDISK the drive you're
having a problem with. Then boot from the Vista DVD and have it format the
drive, then continue with the install.

My other post gave more info but the above is the bottom line fix action.
I'm using that drive right now.

Bob S.




TehJumpingJawa said:
I have an Asus K8N mobo, and am having the exact same problem (blank
screen with flashing cursor after reboot) after installing Vista
Ultimate OEM onto a maxtor 200gig SATA drive. (clean install from the
DVD, only other drive attached is the dvd rom from which I am
installing)

This is the first time I've bothered to buy a licensed copy of
windows.... and will likely be the last. :mad:

Does anyone know exactly what is going wrong? or even better how to
fix it!
Is Vista failing to create a correct mbr on the sata drive?

[edit]

I have just tried installing Vista onto my 300gig pata drive
instead...
It still fails in the same place (when trying to boot from the HD,
after first reboot), but gives an error this time:-
"A disk read error occured
press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

The repair functionality available when booting from the DVD doesn't
find anything wrong, and I can explore the file system of the drive
Vista is installed onto just fine. (as I could when it was installed
on the SATA drive)

I'm beginning to think Vista doesn't work correctly with the ata
controller used on my mobo??? (XP SP1 CD worked fine, never tried
installing direct from an SP2 CD)
The mobo is flashed to the latest available firmware (Rev. 1011 Beta
005), and the rest of my system is pretty standard :-

Athlon 64 3000+,
Asus K8N,
2gb ddr,
GeForce 6800GT 256mb.

One observation that might be a sign of something more serious being
screwed/incompatible; during the Vista installation at several points
the machine appears to lock-up for upto 3 minutes with no visual
feedback of progress. (the mouse cursor still moves though)
The freezes occur;
1) when the installation screen background first appears (the blue
vertical wavey pattern)
2) after entering the product key
3) the dialog for selecting which Vista installation you wish to
repair (when performing a repair.)

BobS said:
Subject line states the problem and before anyone suggests
that I need to
install the SATA drivers during the install process - I have.
Have tried
both the 32 and 64 bit drivers.

Hardware:

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athalon X2
2Gb memory
WDC Raptor 74Gb 10Krpm drives on SATA (x2)
Seagate EIDE drives (x2)
GeForce 6800 graphic cards (x2)

During install, Vista does install to the SATA drive but when
it goes to
first boot, it reboots then comes up to a black screen - no
error messages.
I believe Vista is not recognizing the SATA drives (Sil 3132
SATA controller
on Asus mb) even though the drivers were loaded during the
install process.

Have tried both the 32 and 64 bit Vista installs using the
correct SATA
drivers and even without installing the SATA drivers during
the install
process, I get the same result.

Now I'm thinking it's Vista not recognizing the SATA drives
because if I
load Vista to a standard EIDE drive - it works just fine.
When I look at
the system, Vista does not see the SATA drives until after you
do the first
update and it does download a Sil 3132 update. Then it finds
all the SATA
drives.

So even though the drivers are loaded up-front, Vista doesn't
appear to
"retain" them. I've done numerous clean installs and dual
boot scenarios
and it's the same story - blank screen after first reboot, no
error
messages. I've reformatted the drive used to install Vista
after each
attempt.

I've checked all the manf sites for info and I haven't read
about anyone
else here not being able to load to SATA drives.

One thing I haven't tried is pulling an ATI TV tuner card I
have installed.
I would think it would just come up as an unknown device and
press on, but
then again.

Any suggestions short of booting this thing into next
week........;-)

Thanks,

Bob S.
 
D

Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White

That's interesting. I have the K8N ultra motherboard and I've installed
Vista about 8 times so far.

My primary drive is a 72 gig SATA raptor, which I use for XP. I then have a
300GB Seagate 7220.9 driver which I partition in half and on 1 partition I
have Vista32 and on the other Partition I haveVista64. I have 3 other SATA
drives connected and to EIDE DVD drives.

The only time I ran into issues with the install was when I had a IDE drive
connected to the motherboard. everytime I picked a drive to install to, Vita
would say that drive is not acceptable. Once I unplugged the lone IDE drive
from the motherboard (I had two other IDE drives via a Promise Fast Track
2000 controller) The install went fine.

Maybe it's because I have the Raptor first and the Vista disk is actually
3rd (on the 3rd sata port). I've only done full installs, not upgrades
here.


TehJumpingJawa said:
I have an Asus K8N mobo, and am having the exact same problem (blank
screen with flashing cursor after reboot) after installing Vista
Ultimate OEM onto a maxtor 200gig SATA drive. (clean install from the
DVD, only other drive attached is the dvd rom from which I am
installing)

This is the first time I've bothered to buy a licensed copy of
windows.... and will likely be the last. :mad:

Does anyone know exactly what is going wrong? or even better how to
fix it!
Is Vista failing to create a correct mbr on the sata drive?

[edit]

I have just tried installing Vista onto my 300gig pata drive
instead...
It still fails in the same place (when trying to boot from the HD,
after first reboot), but gives an error this time:-
"A disk read error occured
press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

The repair functionality available when booting from the DVD doesn't
find anything wrong, and I can explore the file system of the drive
Vista is installed onto just fine. (as I could when it was installed
on the SATA drive)

I'm beginning to think Vista doesn't work correctly with the ata
controller used on my mobo??? (XP SP1 CD worked fine, never tried
installing direct from an SP2 CD)
The mobo is flashed to the latest available firmware (Rev. 1011 Beta
005), and the rest of my system is pretty standard :-

Athlon 64 3000+,
Asus K8N,
2gb ddr,
GeForce 6800GT 256mb.

One observation that might be a sign of something more serious being
screwed/incompatible; during the Vista installation at several points
the machine appears to lock-up for upto 3 minutes with no visual
feedback of progress. (the mouse cursor still moves though)
The freezes occur;
1) when the installation screen background first appears (the blue
vertical wavey pattern)
2) after entering the product key
3) the dialog for selecting which Vista installation you wish to
repair (when performing a repair.)

BobS said:
Subject line states the problem and before anyone suggests
that I need to
install the SATA drivers during the install process - I have.
Have tried
both the 32 and 64 bit drivers.

Hardware:

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athalon X2
2Gb memory
WDC Raptor 74Gb 10Krpm drives on SATA (x2)
Seagate EIDE drives (x2)
GeForce 6800 graphic cards (x2)

During install, Vista does install to the SATA drive but when
it goes to
first boot, it reboots then comes up to a black screen - no
error messages.
I believe Vista is not recognizing the SATA drives (Sil 3132
SATA controller
on Asus mb) even though the drivers were loaded during the
install process.

Have tried both the 32 and 64 bit Vista installs using the
correct SATA
drivers and even without installing the SATA drivers during
the install
process, I get the same result.

Now I'm thinking it's Vista not recognizing the SATA drives
because if I
load Vista to a standard EIDE drive - it works just fine.
When I look at
the system, Vista does not see the SATA drives until after you
do the first
update and it does download a Sil 3132 update. Then it finds
all the SATA
drives.

So even though the drivers are loaded up-front, Vista doesn't
appear to
"retain" them. I've done numerous clean installs and dual
boot scenarios
and it's the same story - blank screen after first reboot, no
error
messages. I've reformatted the drive used to install Vista
after each
attempt.

I've checked all the manf sites for info and I haven't read
about anyone
else here not being able to load to SATA drives.

One thing I haven't tried is pulling an ATI TV tuner card I
have installed.
I would think it would just come up as an unknown device and
press on, but
then again.

Any suggestions short of booting this thing into next
week........;-)

Thanks,

Bob S.
 
G

Guest

That is an interesting find and I'll give it a go - latter. Right now the
system is in the final throws of loading the x64 version onto an EIDE drive.
Sure has been a couple of long days with Vista but I've learned quite a bit.
I'm sure there will be some more patches and updates from all the vendors
just to make it even more interesting.I think I have tried just about every
variation/combination that there is. Even made Vista backup recovery
images - works fine.

Oh boy.....the message..."please wait while windows prepares to start for
the first time" just popped up on the other system - we now have "completing
upgrade" and we now have a bit of a wait....

This works fine on the EIDE so for now we're gonna be up and running Vista
x64 even though it's not on one of the Raptor drives.

Now if you can just find me a little magic SATA dust to sprinkle on this box
we'll be in business. Thank you for your help it is greatly appreciated. I
think you nailed the problem I suspected but couldn't prove.

Bob S.

Thanks!
I have almost the same config as you BobS and finally I managed to install
32bit Vista on a EIDE drive.
Not ideal, but it works!
 

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