Pain in my ASRock (4CoreDual)

[Mussels]

If the drive doesn't detect the extra ground cables to make the 80 it limits the speed to UDMA3 or Ultra ATA 66. It doesn't prevent the drive from working, just from performing at its theoretical best.

I am going to agree with Mussels, either get a boot floppy or CD to run memtest http://www.memtest86.com/


And or downclock everythign a bit.

Actually it locks it to ATA 33, on 40 pin cables.

What it sounds like is he has installed his OS to an IDE and a sata drive, and both reboot once he reaches windows - once he even had errors installing the OS. To me that sounds like system instability, due to overheating, or most likely - bad/badly configured ram.

 

[Steevo]

Dammit. You are right


Ahh the days of slicing flat 40 pin cables to zip them up into a bunch.

 

[aximbigfan]

ok, try the followign things:

make SURE the 775 cooler is on tight!

reflash the bios to latest version

after you get doen reflashing, set up the bios

boot off of xp install disk and format and install

before you do ANYTHING
reboot
install chipset drivers....
reboot
then video drivers....
reboot
then sound, and any other drivers
reboot

then lets see what happens.


chris

 

[Mussels]

DO what he said, but where he sais instasll XP - run memtest at that point. If memtest fails, adjust memory settings til its stable, then install XP.

 

[GJSNeptune]

Hmmm, just a question but do you have an SATA based DVD drive handy?

I don't.

Actually it locks it to ATA 33, on 40 pin cables.

What it sounds like is he has installed his OS to an IDE and a sata drive, and both reboot once he reaches windows - once he even had errors installing the OS. To me that sounds like system instability, due to overheating, or most likely - bad/badly configured ram.

I only have Windows on a 160GB SATA drive. The 40GB IDE drive is blank. If the system tries to boot Windows, it reboots itself after the Windows boot screen. When it tries to boot Windows from the CD, I get a disk read error.

How can the RAM be bad if both sticks run at 200MHz just fine with my old board. Actually, I had three sticks in my old board, but this one only has two DDR slots. Is this board super-picky?

ok, try the followign things:

make SURE the 775 cooler is on tight! It is. Very tight.

reflash the bios to latest version I will try once I'm home from work. I've only flashed BIOS via a Windows utility, so I'll be careful and research how to do it best.

after you get doen reflashing, set up the bios

boot off of xp install disk and format and install

before you do ANYTHING
reboot
install chipset drivers....
reboot
then video drivers....
reboot
then sound, and any other drivers
reboot

then lets see what happens.


chris

Can't wait for work to end. Just got here though.

DO what he said, but where he sais instasll XP - run memtest at that point. If memtest fails, adjust memory settings til its stable, then install XP.

My memory is fine, and nothing is overclocked. I'm not about to adjust voltage and speed before I even get Windows to work.

 

[erocker]

http://www.asrock.com/support/SATARAIDDriver.html

Get that driver and save it to a floppy or mabye a flash drive if it'll work. When you first install the CD for Windows, you have to keep hitting F6.. If I remember correctly. From there you have to go through more crap. Windows is getting to the boot screen and then realizing it doesn't have the correct sata drivers for Windows to run. Your bios will recognize the HDD's just fine. Hope this helps.

* Here's a link to the rest of the drivers: http://www.asrock.com/mb/download.asp?Model=4CoreDual-VSTA&s=

 

[Mussels]

I don't.
My memory is fine, and nothing is overclocked. I'm not about to adjust voltage and speed before I even get Windows to work.

The memory could be fine, here is an example - what if your old mobo ran at 1.9V default, and the new one runs at 1.8V - the memory could be unstable because of this. You're really only checking that the automatic settings are correct, they CAN go wrong.


P.S - yes i used DDR2 voltage examples above. Its just an example.

 

[GJSNeptune]

http://www.asrock.com/support/SATARAIDDriver.html

Get that driver and save it to a floppy or mabye a flash drive if it'll work. When you first install the CD for Windows, you have to keep hitting F6.. If I remember correctly. From there you have to go through more crap. Windows is getting to the boot screen and then realizing it doesn't have the correct sata drivers for Windows to run. Your bios will recognize the HDD's just fine. Hope this helps.

I had to do that for my old (AMD) board. I thought Intel didn't have that problem 'cause SATA drivers were already there. Hitting F6 is fine if Windows would boot from the CD. I just get that stupid disk read error. Sometimes I don't know if it's the optical drive or the IDE hard drive. When it's supposed to boot from the CD, I don't see the drive light on. But maybe that's the actual problem.

Which concerns me that it is something wrong with the board because the first time I tried to boot from the Windows CD, it worked, and it seemingly installed on my 40GB IDE drive, and then upon reboot, I got a disk read error. Something went wrong between installation and reboot, and now the board seems useless.


@Mussells
I'll check out the RAM voltage. I didn't realize the new board could be sending the same RAM a different amount. Thanks.


Seems like a defective board or something, so now I'm out what I paid for the board as well as for the Pentium D.

 

[GJSNeptune]

I'm gonna run memtest after work today just for the hell of it. I'm quite positive my memory is just fine though. I'm still stumped and hoping it's not a defective board. It only cost me $25, but if I buy the same board from Newegg, I might as well tack on the $25 to become like $90. That's just ridiculous.

I don't know what most of the BIOS options mean, but there are some boot-related options that I might disable. Other than that, I just don't know what the problem is. I guess I could run a diagonistic on the hard drive, and maybe try a Windows XP floppy boot disk.

Stupid not-working computer parts.

 

[GJSNeptune]

Am running memtest86+ as I type this. The first pass caught one failing address for two errors, and so far the second pass hasn't detected any (and it's gone past the point where it caught the first one).

BIOS is set to run my memory at DDR400 like it should be.

 

[GJSNeptune]

Well, I decided to try my storage SATA drive only, and Windows is booting from the CD, detecting hardware, and seems to be initializing to install on the drive. Why the hell did it hate my IDE drive? And why wouldn't it boot my other SATA drive with Windows on it?

Also, how does Windows partition feature work? If I have it create a partition in an unpartitioned space, does that mean it creates a partition where there's no data, or just start at the beginning of the drive?

 

[aximbigfan]

ok, sorry for no response from me, been getting my new tablet pc up :grin:

ANYWAY, make SURE that your RAM is se to run at the correct timings. i had a problem with a clients computer yesterday where the system would lock up when i restarted it. turned out that the memory had the wrong values set in the timings section in the bios.

if you can, set the bios to automatically set timings from SPD.


chris

 

[GJSNeptune]

I have BIOS running it at 2.5, which is the advertised CAS latency of the sticks.

 

[aximbigfan]

I have BIOS running it at 2.5, which is the advertised CAS latency of the sticks.

ahhh!

change it so that the bios automatically gets the timings.

chris

 

[GJSNeptune]

Any idea about Windows setup partitioning? I have some data on this drive that I'd rather not lose, but I'm assuming creating a partition just formats the entire drive since the drive has no partitions.

 

[GJSNeptune]

Got Windows to install. Got confirmation that XP will ignore previous data on a hard drive if you don't have it format. Was a big relief. Windows is currently finishing the install. Phew!