Setup reboots constantly during install

[jbjones]

I'm having a little trouble with my install. Has anyone seen this or have any ideas of the cause?

I have a Giga-Byte GA-K8NXP-SLI with a Western Digital 80GB SATA system drive plugged into the nVidia SATA port 1 and a 250GB plugged into the nVidia SATA 2.

During the install it shows both of my drives which Windows setup partitioned and formated. After the files are transfered to the hard drive the system reboots. Just like a normal 32-bit WinXP install.

The problem I'm having is that the computer is rebooting into the original setup routine every time. It asks to reformat or delete the files from the previous installation each time, so I know the data is being transfered. Even if I remove the CD as the computer reboots it just sits there looking for the CD. It's like the hard drives are not bootable or something. I don't think it's a driver problem because setup was able to see the drives to perform the format and appeares to work flawlessly up to the point of the first reboot.

Any ideas?

JBJones

[jbjones]

This is brand new hardware by the way. I don't know for sure that I the BIOS is set right. However I've been searching through every setting and can't find anything that would tell it to boot one way or the other using the SATA.

I just tried an older 32 bit WinXP. It does the same thing. Course that doesn't rule out any driver problems. But still.

JBJones

[Pyr0]

your motherboard chipset shouldn't need any extra drivers to install windows.

the nforce4 chipset is supposed to be natively supported by win64. (in non raid mode)

have you tried stripping it down to the bare essentials? - just one hard drive, one stick of memory etc.

are you overclocking?

i'd definately check your bios settings, check to see the boot order is correct(and the rest of the settings)

also, could you post some more details on the hardware in your pc, it might make it easier to diagnose <shrugs>

it does kinda sound like a sata driver prob tho.

does it happen if you try installing on either hard drive?

[Seanie's Show]

I was going to say the same thing, take one hard drive out or just disconnect it, and just leave which ever drive you want to install windows onto connected you can always reconnect the 2nd drive when instalation is complete.

also I would recommend during set-up you do a full NTFS format of the drve rather than a quick format, especially as they are brand new, I know it takes a long time but its well worth doing, mine takes about 20secs on a quick and about 30mins on a full.

And last, if it keeps booting back into set-up after every re-boot, when it has finished formatting and copying the files required for set-up, when it re-boots, just go into your bios quickly and disable all of your boot devices apart from your hard drive so the only thing it will look at is you hard drives rather than the cd drives etc, also disable your RAID chips if you are not using RAID as this maybe causing a problem with 2 un-identical drives attached, just disable everything in the bios that you wont be using. the cd is no longer required after the first re-boot apart from half way through set-up when it will copy some files and your machine will know where to look for those.

You have the same mobo as me and they are very funny boards for things like that, brilliant when they are set-up, but just a bit strange at first.

[Seanie's Show]

Oh, I forgot to mention, can you see your SATA drives in the bios, you should see them in standard CMOS features, you will see your main 4 IDE devices and then underneath that it should list the SATA drives, if you cant then you need to go into Intergrated Peripherals and make sure your SATA chips are turned on, but your RAID's are turned off, press control and F1 in the bios for more features.

[jbjones]

I figured out the problem. It's actually a documentation problem. The manual was saying I needed to enable SATA/RAID in the Advanced settings area, but the only option showing was Hard Drive. So I figured that had to be what they were talking about.

I finally figured out that when the RAID is completely disabled then new menus appear. But anyway, completely disabling the RAID seemed to allow it to boot to the single drives.

Is it not possible to use half as single drives and half as a RAID drive with these controlers? I had hopped to eventually add more drives for my secondary and create a RAID. But I don't know how that would work with a single boot drive.

JBJones

[Pyr0]

you should have no problem using two drives in raid0, and other hard drives as singles.

in the bios there should be an option to enable the nvidia raid, and then other options to select which drives you want to use.

i had two sataII drives in raid0, and two PATA drives as singles(until i formatted )

edit: my motherboard is the asus a8n-sli dlx, but it should still apply as they use the same chipset