Anyone recently installed XP/MCE using SATA HDD and Gigabyte 965p board ?

[hazerb30]

Im having a hell of a time just installing an OS on this drive at the moment. If someone has some clue im all ears (but no hair left..)

Ive got the gigabyte board and using Sata 300GB Samsung HDD. I tried installing XP using CD and it starts off ok loading all the drivers required and then says 'Starting installation' or something and goes straight to blue screen of death with 0x0000007b. Never get to format drive or choose where to install windows at all.

Now apparently this error is something about unable to access a drive to install to. I thought that made sense (ive never installed XP to SATA drive before) and it might need a F6 driver during boot. I downloaded drivers for it (several times from different sources) and it seems happy with it but still get the BSOD. tried so many times.

The drive detects in BIOS ok.
I have updated BIOS


For BIOS SATA setting, Should i be using AHCI,RAID,RAID/IDE or IDE ?
Is there some jumpers or settings of the drive that im missing?

Am i looking at the wrong area completely ? Surely this cant be this hard..

[slimf]

Hi hazerb30

my brand new work PC consists of the following:

Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard
Intel 6600 Dual Core CPU
WD Raptor 10000rpm HDD (sata)
8800GTS video card
2 Gig Corsair Pro memory
blah blah blah
Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit

When you setup your HDD, you need to make sure its NOT setup as a raid, or Windows certainly wont install unless you provide it with the driver disk for your raid controller. (which the 965 board can do, but you dont need to as your not using raid)

In the BIOS you need to select the ... Rebooting to see what the flammin setting is...

5 min later....

Ahh, thats right.. you need to set the mode to ACHI.

The three possible settings should be IDE, ACHI and RAID.

Short explination of what they do:

IDE - Runs the hard drive using the same protocols as the old PATA drives.
ACHI - Gives you the new features that sata can provide such as Native Command Queing (speed), Hot plugging.

IF you get grief installing your OS, change the setting to IDE.. BUT after VISTA (and your chipset drivers are installed) are installed change the BIOS back to ACHI - When vista boots it will detect new hardware and install the drivers automagically.

[logifuse]

Originally Posted by hazerb30

Now apparently this error is something about unable to access a drive to install to. I thought that made sense (ive never installed XP to SATA drive before) and it might need a F6 driver during boot. I downloaded drivers for it (several times from different sources) and it seems happy with it but still get the BSOD. tried so many times.

Do you actually get to the point of selecting the drivers?

What you need to understand is that the XP install process dates back to NT 3.51 (maybe earlier?) & it likes the idea of providing additional drivers on floppy disk (yes, your read it correctly). Best bet is to download the drivers & extract them to a floppy disk, then you hit F6 (a number of times) when prompted & then you insert the floppy disk. It will look for a file called oemsetup.txt & you'll then get a selection box for your drivers. If you're not using RAID, don't select the RAID driver, or select one driver & when loaded, choose to select another until you can no longer select any more drivers from the disk.

You should then be able to proceed with the install.

Justin

[slimf]

Yeah, Sata drivers are required, but only if the drive is in ACHI mode during the windows OS install.

If you set it to IDE, do the OS install, then switch it back to ACHI, windows will detect the hardware change, install the relevant drivers and go on its merry way.


hazerb30 - If you would prefer to install your OS with ACHI mode (probably reccommended) then check on page 76 of you manual. (It should have instructions on how to make the sata driver disk)

[logifuse]

Originally Posted by slimf

Yeah, Sata drivers are required, but only if the drive is in ACHI mode during the windows OS install.

Unfortunately hazerb30 has posted this in the wrong forum.

AFAIK any SATA controller needs the drivers loaded for Windows XP. None are supported natively because SATA came after XP. Even if the drives are in "IDE" mode, they're still SATA.

Vista is a different story.

Justin

[hazerb30]

Thank you all for the responses. I look forward to going home for another 'battle'

Slimf thanks for confirming AHCI is the one to go for. Failing this i will try the IDE but i believe ive already tried both.

My main hope atm is in looking closer at the samsung drive and possible jumpers on it as suggested by badapple in my build thread.

Logifuse i have got to the point of selecting drivers every time and ive got the drivers on a disk (got direct from gigabyte website 32bit version for XP). Strange thing is, if you download the driver from the europe mirror its different to the Asia link! Confuses things more.. Ive even gone to the chipset manufacturers website and downloaded it from them and still BSOD.

No matter what drivers i select or what setting in bios or what sata ports im using (because there are purple gigabyte plugs and intel orange plugs) it always BSOD

[hazerb30]

Resolved!

It was nothing to do with the board/drivers or bios settings. It was just a simple case of a dodgy install CD. Either the scratches were too bad or just using a older copy of XP worked i dont know. Man what time i wasted on this!

Thank you for all your help. And i soldier on...

[slimf]

Glad you got it working.. Just make sure you put the BIOS in ACHI or you wont get the benifit of NCQ (Speed) or the other Sata benifits. Windows will detect the hardware and install the drivers on first boot after you make the change.