Hardware

Get and old floppy drive and create the sata driver files and load them during the install as I think this is the problem

There is another way without using a floopy:
Get hold of a "IDE" hdd and load Windows onto this, once loaded you can do a copy/clone over to the sata drives (once you have loaded sata drivers from motherboard cd/dvd rom disk(s)). Hope this helps you. Make sure you have a extra hdd for a backup, this does help.

harddrives corrupt really quickly if your ram is bad... and it's very very very hard to detect bad ram sometimes. The last time I had this the ONLY way I knew it was the ram in hte end was that I took the ram out of the machine and put ram I just bought in it...

Sometimes it's just the port as well. So the ram might be good but the mobo port for that ram is broken.


In any event, it sounds like either the mobo is broken... perhaps the harddrive controller... or port... or it's a ram issue with either on the ram itself or the ram port.


In either case... I believe this is a hardware and not a software issue. I'd give the whole thing back to whomever you bought it from, tell them you want a COMPLETELY different machine, and hope you're not unlucky with that one as well. you might do yourself a favor, tell them what happened, and then ask them to make sure the new one doesn't have that problem. or you could just give it back, get a refund, and buy it from someone that does proper testing.


I personally just buy the parts and build them myself from the ground up every single time. I find that buying prebuilt systems generally leads to headaches. Even when you buy from someone like dell there's always bs to deal with... when you build it yourself, you know it's been done right. And that is worth the time investment. If you don't have the time for that, then pay someone you KNOW to do it. Or you're talking to india when there are issues or otherwise don't have control.

Is it more expensive to do it this way? No. Because while you pay more upfront you pay less over time in wasted tech support, faulty construction, faulty design, or having to explain to someone how to spell your name when you name happens to be something basic like "Ben"... or "Joe"...


Anyway, I've been burned almost every single time I haven't had a machine custom built. I'm always hunting for drivers not included in the package, talking to lackwits through an IP phone in india, or something equally annoying that eats up more hours then I'd like to mention of my finite life. Do it right the first time.

I upgraded a friend's computer and had the same issue with the new SATA drives and old IDE drive. Basically it would not work with both the SATA and IDE drive in it. Ended up getting an image of the old IDE and took it out. Once I loaded Windows on the new SATA drives, I mounted the image and recovered his data. I could never get it to work with both drives in it. I did get different errors depending on the jumper placement and the SATA settings, but it never would work.

So it turned out to be the sata drivers after all. I downloaded Nlite, and did a slipstreamed windows xp install with the mb drivers (and display because I'm lazy by this point), and voila, no problems. Seems XP has issues with nforce sata drivers.

In any case, thanks for the help guys and hope this thread helps someone else.