Hi All,
I’m supposed to be retired, but still help friends in trouble. Im not scared of XP Pro – I’ve recovered a number of “dead” systems & installed/reinstallaed about 6 systems this last 12 months, but this one has me stuck!
My friends system has an Asus M2N4-SLI M/BRD with 2 Gb DDR2 RAM, a dual-core Athlon 64 4600 and a 250 GB SATA Maxtor drive. It has been running XP Pro with an identical drive, but for various reasons, he wants a clean install on a newly formatted drive (NTFS).
So I created a RAID driver floppy, with the MB CD, plugged in the new HDD to the first SATA cable and started installing, using a brand new XP Pro SP2 (OEM) CD in the DVD/RW drive – having checked that the BIOS recognises both the SATA drive and the IDE DVD/RW (seen as “CDROM”). The first part of the install is OK (used F6 & loaded SATA-Raid controller drivers – 2 of them) but at the first reboot I get “missing operating system”.
What I have Tried!!
Booted from Win98 floppy, deleted NTFS partition. Created new NTFS partition (using Ranish Partition Manager). Reran setup – same error!
Same again, but made a FAT32 partition (formatted it). Retried install – same error.
Tried again with only one RAM stick (1 Gig).
Same error!
Told XP to convert partition to NTFS – same error!
Told XP to delete partition and create and format a new NTFS partition (seems to work fine). Same error on first boot!
The system does not seem to be able to use the SATA controller drivers in XP ?!? But the original (pre-installed) HDD runs fine on the same SATA cable!!
Any clues anyone?
Nick
PS. If anyone has a fix using Linux, that’s fine, I have Ubuntu & Fedora, but I’m a bit rusty on the CLI (used to work on Sun workstations about 15 Yrs ago).