Here is one for the books!

[shannanl]

I have used Soyo motherboards before but never this model. I am trying to build two computers using Soyo's SY-K7VMP2 motherboards. I am doing fresh installs, deleting the partition, creating another and a full format of the drive. It will not format the drive. It runs to 100% and then says the drive can't be formatted, it might be damaged. I have formatted it using the XP disk AND a Win 98 boot disk (fdisk /mbr, fdisk and format c. It seems to do fine on the boot disk as Fat 32 but crashes again when I try to format it to NTFS. I have tried 6 different hard drives between these two computers and I have only been able to get XP to install twice. Both times it locked up constantly. The other times it just said it could not format the drive, it might be damaged. One of these drives was brand new, all are known good drives. I tried different ram in the computer thinking maybe that had some effect on it. I tried 3 different install disks and two different cd rom drives. I moved the hard drive off the primary controller to the secondary controller and changed cables several times. Its happening with both computers that have these motherboards in them so it has to be the boards I think. I also flashed the BIOS on one of them with the latest and greatest from SOYO. I am out of options. Has anyone ever ran across anything like this? I have built several computers, probably a hundred and never had this problem before.

Thanks,

Shannan

 

[happydownloader]

One of the things most people forget is turn off the virus detection in the bios.
Try it again and I bet it works

 

[shannanl]

I sure will. Let you know shortly if it works.

Thanks,

Shannan

 

[shannanl]

I could only find one mention of virus in the BIOS and it was virus warning. It is set to disabled by default and it is still disabled.

Thanks,

Shannan

 

[edfair]

What kind of cables? And what length.
Noisy stuff and certain lengths that lead to standing waves can create havoc on installs.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[shannanl]

I tried several different IDE cables. The length is the standard length, I guess 18 inches or so. I have never had a problem with IDE cables before.

Shannan

 

[shannanl]

I may have found the solution. I called Soyo support and here is what he had me do. I am running a XP 2400, 266 DDR memory. He had me manually set the bus speed, dram speed, etc. to 266 and then clear the CMOS. So far so good. I am 16 minutes from finishing up the install and so far its good.

Shannan