X64 Premium Clean Insall Problems

[Guest]

I did a clean install of Vista x64 Home Premium with XP Home already
installed on another drive. I have 5 drives. 2 Sata and 3 IDE. I installed
Vista on a 250gig Sata drive. Since installation I have had 4 different types
of BSOD... IRQ Less and or Equal, Memory Management, and 2 others I can't
remember. The system keeps crashing or I get errors that various services
have stopped. I have even gotten a few times where I get the error that the
Validation Period had expired. I can't boot up my old XP as Vista Booter says
it can't find the Boot.ini file. All told the system had recorded 29 error
that it had no solutions for. My system is a Asus K8-VM with 2gb ram and
AMD-64 3000+, Geforce 7300 GS and using the onboard Sound and LAN. At one
point Vista said the Video drivers were bad. I was going to install
VistaBootPro to try and get XP to run, but even for the few minutes Vista is
up and running it won't let me install the program. Any ideas? Suggestion? I
do know a few tricks to restore the XP but I am hoping to get this
installation working.

 

[BobS]

TomKo,

First - try Safe booting into Vista and see if that stays stable.

Next - your problem *may* be related to the absence of an nForce 64 bit SATA
driver. I have the A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard and it uses the nForce 4
chipset drivers for the internal SATA controller. It also has an external
eSATA port that uses a Silicone Image (Sil 3132) SATA controller.

Asus confirmed that the motherboards using the nForce 4 drivers will not
work until Nvidia releases the 64 bit drivers. That could possibly be your
problem. I can load Vista x64 onto an IDE drive and I can load Vista 32 bit
onto a SATA drive but cannot load Vista x64 on any internal SATA drives. I
have tried all kinds of combinations down to bare-bones everything not
needed for a minimal system was either turned off in the BIOS or removed -
and it still would not work.

Something to try anyway. I'm getting ready to run a test and see if the 64
bit version will load to my eSATA drive.

Bob S.

 

[Guest]

I am in safe mode right now. It is completely stable. I downloaded the new
Nvidia SATA drivers released today and installed from within safe-mode. Not
sure if it took. When I rebooted it said that the SATA driver was updated and
proceeded to give me a page fault error. It does seem to be some sort of
hardware driver that is causing my problems since I can run in safe mode.

 

[BobS]

TomKo,

Just downloaded all the new Vista drivers (x86 and x64) plus the WinXP
updates. I'll try the Vista drivers tomorrow and see what blows up. Thanks
for mentioning that the new drivers were posted today - I figured at least
another week. I didn't check the Asus site but I'll still need a driver to
load in during the Vista x64 install. Maybe that driver package has it -
I'll do an in-place update and see.

If your system is still unstable - minimize it by turning everything off in
the BIOS that you don't need for a test and physically disconnect all the
other hard drives and USB/Firewire etc.

You need a graphics card, memory, one SATA drive (internal), DVD and maybe a
floppy. I know your memory is fairly new - but test it. Been reading in
several forums where Vista has turned up some intermittent memory modules.
I did a quick test of mine during the install process - under the repair
option.

If you have two graphics cards - reduce it to one and make the change in the
BIOS (if any needed). I did have one problem when I had a older IDE drive
on and one I tossed that, no more problems - forget what the error code was
but Vista nailed it. The page fault error could be caused by spanning a
drive with the page file (can do it in WinXP). Is there enough space on the
drive and has it been defragged?

Bob S.