P5N-E SLI + SATA + XP, problem installing XP (blue screen)

[mrkan]

I have a lot of trouble recently with my new configuration with P5N-E SLI motherboard, SATA disk, and Intel Quad processor.
My PC has secondary master CD ROM and sata hd on SATA1. BIOS is able to see my sata disk, and through XP installation I would push F6 to install sata/raid controller. Didn't notice any problems there.

So, after XP (32bit) installation is done, (after second reboot when I've create user, set networks, choose time, etc...) PC boots up, then I get UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error (blue screeen).

I tried to fix it with chkdsk /r, I would get message that hard drive can not be repaired. I tried FIXBOOT, that doesn't work either.

I ran some diagnostic Seagate software and HD seems to be fine. It passed all tests.
I also plugged HD to my old PC with XP and I formatted it there (to NTFS). I didn't want to use windows for formatting/partitioning... same thing...blue screen.

I noticed, during installation of XP, there were two partitions, one big one that I formatted on my old PC and it was marked with C:, but there was a small one also, several megabytes of unpartitioned space. I have no idea where this is coming from.

I tried installing Vista (should be written with small "V") and didn't work. Vista would freeze in last stage "Completing Installation". I would just hung there with no error message.

Is there anything in BIOS that I should pay attention to, some settings that maybe microsoft doesn't like?
My opinion is that one of the hardware component is wrong. How do I know which one?


Any help is appreciated...

 

[roland63]

I believe the problem arises when installing SATA drivers when your mobo already recognizes SATA hard drives.

Normally drivers are needed on mobos that don't recognis\ze SATA drives.

Perhaps you can try again without loading SATA drivers?

 

[mrkan]

I tried that, but it didn't work.

Generally installation would recognize smaller size of disk. For example, my hd is 320GB, and installation would see only 128 GB.... (if I would not install sata/raid controller) Not sure what is happenining.

Right now, I managed to install XP on some old IDE hd (32GB), everything works fine. (that tells me that, at least, all other hardware components are fine). In XP, now I can see my sata drive as 128 Gb hd, WHY? I tried to format it and max size is 128 GB. What happen with rest of the space?

Thanks,

 

[BadBigBen]

Look at the HDD and check the jumpering, some drives allow themselves to be jumpered to the 128gb (137gb) limit...

There will always be 8mb left over, when you partition and format the drive under XP...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[Freestone]

In order for XP to recognize greater than 137GB, two things must be present:

o motherboard BIOS with LBA support, i.e. it recognizes drives larger than 137GB

o XP must be at least at Service Pack 1

See

http://www.48bitlba.com/winxp.htm

If your BIOS is ok then if you have an XP CD without a service pack, you can create a slipstreamed CD that will contain XP with SP2:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm

And it seems an 8MB or so partition is created when one creates an extended partition on a drive versus a primary partition. That's been my experience anyway.