bsod installing windows mce sata drivers - help!

[LionelR]

1st I'd like to say thanks to everyone for making this such an awesome site. It has helped me immensely through my first build.

Well, -almost- through my 1st build. I'm stuck in a BIG way. Some background:

Intel Pentium D 830
ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard
Sapphire ATI x800xl PCI-E
2 Western Digital SATA Drives
Toshiba DVD-ROM
Memorex floppy
Windows MCE (trying anyway)

I have some other stuff still in the wrappers, but this is it until I get Windows loaded. After some exasperating floppy drive trouble (too much to get into), I am installing Windows and trying to load the SATA drivers. I press F6, load the drivers, everything seems to works fine until, at the point where Windows is starting, I get a STOP: error. 0x0000007b and some other numbers. I tried researching, but the only threads I could find say that the error happens b/c the drivers need to be loaded. My drivers are already loaded, I think...

Am I missing something simple and obvious here? I really hope so, because I have no idea where to go from here. Please help, I am going into day four of getting this comp going, and I need some sleep...

As of now, I have tried disconnecting one of the drives, disabling all onboard devices, and disabling all boot devices except the optical drive.

Thanks for your help.

[Ob1]

follow this guide when installing your sata drivers
http://www.bcae1.com/comptutorial/installingxp.html

[LionelR]

Thanks Ob1. I did exactly as the link says, but I am still getting the error message. I tried installing the obvious one first (ich7r RAID controller) and it didn't work. I tried the ACHI controller with no results. I tried each one of the choices available. No go. I tried recreating the driver disk, thinking there may be something work with the data on the floppy. Nope.

I've tried configuring the SATA as Standard IDE and SATA. All have the same error.

What am I missing? Should I just return these SATA drives and go with IDE? I really don't want to do that - I'd rather find out why this isn't working.

What if I install the OS to an IDE drive - can I get these SATA drives working later and move the OS onto them? I have a spare 13GB IDE drive. Do you think Windows MCE will fit into 13 gigs?

Thanks.

[Nav]

I dont have much experience with SATA but isnt there an option in the BIOS that you need to enable? Sorry, i dont know much more but you may want to snoop around in your BIOS. Something about RAID maybe.....

[Panama Red]

Check the bios as Nav has suggested. If the SATA drive(s) are detected, chances are you don't need to install SATA drivers. You would then only use the "Press F6" prompt to install Raid drivers. If you do not plan to use a Raid configuration, I'd suggest disabling the Raid feature in the bios. This will prevent a nusiance notification at boot up of missing drivers (RAID drivers).

If the SATA hdd's are recognized in the bios, make sure the hard drive order is setup correctly. Often times the IDE drives are the default first hard drive and you need to change the order. Also check the Boot priority and make sure the SATA drive is selected. Put the CD rom earlier in the boot sequence than the hard drive, but make sure the proper hard drive is in the boot sequence. Hope this makes sense.

[LionelR]

Thanks Nav, I have tried different bios configurations (see below) with no effect.

Panama, I had my terminology a little mixed up. In the first post I meant to say I was trying to install the RAID drivers, not SATA drivers. Onward...

My drives are detected and showing up as third ide master and slave.
Primary master and slave and fourth master and slave are [not detected]. In the submenu, I changed the type for these to [not installed]. There is no secondary. (I think these are the ide channels for the ICH7R southbridge; does that have anything to do with it? I wouldn't think so, b/c these are the only sata connections besides the silicone image connector for the hotplug, but I'm really stuck and trying to think of anything...)

My "Configure SATA as" is set to [standard ide]. The onboard Ide operate mode is set to [enhanced]. Enhanced Mode Support On is set to [sata].

I tried setting it up this way and also with "configure SATA as" [RAID].
Neither of them worked.

Ideally, I would like to set up either a RAID 1 or Intel Matrix Storage configuration. Should the Sata be configured as RAID before or after I install windows? The manual isn't clear on this (the instructions appear in different parts of the manual).

At this point, I'm into it so far, I'd really like to see this to completion (RAID set, not ide).

I've turned RAID on, checked the hard drive order: they are (its fine), and my boot device order is: dvd-rom, floppy, hard drive.

Also, I found something else I probably needed to to. During POST, I hit Ctrl-I and I was able to set up the RAID set to RAID 1; now my two drives show as only one in the BIOS. THe details in the RAID setup screen say that the drive is bootable. I think that's a step in the right direction. So I thought, no problem, this should work. Still, after F6 and choosing both
ich7r choices (RAID and ACHI)...blue screens. 0x0000007b. Hey, this is fun!

So, to recap: RAID 1 turned on, configured in bios, drive is recognized, drive boot order correct, boot device order correct, loaded both RAID drivers for ich7r chip (tried twice, different one each time), still bsod. Only devices connected are DVD-ROM,floppy, 2 hard drives (now configured as RAID1), and video card.

What else can I do? I'm out of ideas, but I am new at this. There are other choice of drivers to install from the floppy, but they are for older southbridge chips. It wouldn't be one of those, would it?

BTW, over the past few days, I've restarted my new computer after a bsod about 5000 times. Am I hurting it?


1 more thing: I had a buddy who went to JOTC in Panama in the 90's. He said the howler monkeys were insane.

Thank you all for your help.


EDIT: Here is a copy of a post from another site with the same problem I'm having. Do you think this could be it? I have 2 western digital 320GB drives and an Asus motherboard. Has anyone heard of this before? I'd rather try anything else before I start putting components back in the mail...

" SUCCESS!

ok so i finally got this computer working, thanks again to everyone who posted... for the cpu heat problem, apparently there was something wrong with the fan, the whole heatsink/fan was replaced and im running at a much healthier 41 deg C now.

also i got an answer as to why i was getting that error when trying to install xp. it turns out (according to the store where i got my parts) that some 80gb sata hard drives from western digital cannot be recognized by some asus motherboards. apparently that was the problem that i was having. so i returned both 80 gb hdds and replaced them with a single 200gb hdd (and got some money back) and now i'm up and running with no problems.

once again, thanks for everyone's help. biggrin.gif "

[LionelR]

Anyone have any ideas?

[LionelR]

Ok, I think the problem may be somewhere else.

I cleared the CMOS, and I disconnected the sata drives. Then I connected the spare 13GB Maxtor IDE to the Primary IDE channel (not on the southbridge). The DVD_ROM is on the secondary channel. I changed all of the BIOS settings to match.

Same blue screen at the same point. I am going to try removing all but one of my RAM sticks.

Other than that, What else could it be? The video card? It seems to be working ok. There's nothing else on the system.

Thanks, any help is greatly appreciated.

[glc]

You may have a defective operating system CD.

[LionelR]

thanks, I will try using this CD on another system. What do you think of the setup I described 3 posts ago? Does it look like everything was correct?

[LionelR]

In case anyone is listening, I finally (partially) figured it out.

The CD turned out to be fine.

I never did install windows onto the RAID setup, but I used one of the drives as an IDE connection. It was still freezeing on me, and I think I may have had three problems (not sure which one actually solved it):

1. The first ide drive I was using was 13GB. I think that it was too small to install Windows MCE 2005.

2. The sata drive I used alone was too big (320 GB). I created a partition of 100GB b/c I found on other sites that sometime Windows has trouble installing on a partition greater that 147GB.

3. Drivers. Originally, I tried loading the sata drivers from the Asus CD that was included with thte mother board. When that didn't work, I tried installing drivers from the Intel website. That didn't work either. I decided to try seeing if there was anything on the ASUS site, and there were some ATAPI IDE drivers that seemed to work.

I hope this helps someone, I am no expert - just navigating through this whole thing blindly. But now I have installed Windows, and I'll try the RAId array from there.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

[super_nova777]

I had th same problem...hope yours is solved by now if not...just take your optical drive cable (dvd rom o cd rom) and remove it fromt he red IDEs and switch it to the blue ide.....

It is a very unusual solution and must have something to do with win xp.....but....