The Devil is in my computer

[rmg185]

Ok, I recently bought a new Mother Board (Soyo SY-P4VSA) and had it professionaly installed. The only thing that was left for me to do was format the hard drive and install the OS. No big deal, so I thought...
Anyway here are the symptoms of my computer:

1) Cannot install Windows XP pro onto formatted, partitioned hard drive- freezes on "Setting up Windows" after copying files

**It was at this point that I installed Windows 98, and the drivers on the CD that came with the motherboard, which works but has the following symptoms**

2) Hard Drive is running in MS-Dos compatibility mode

3) Exclamation point in yellow circle appears next to "Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)" on Device manager

4) Cannot upgrade to ME- upgrade stops partway through after an error message

5) Cannod upgrade to XP - freezes on XP startup screen halfway through upgrade

6) Cannot restart computer in MS-Dos mode from Windows 98- goes to a blank screen with blinking cursor in upper left hand corner.

**I've tried installing two seperate hard drives (30 gig Quantum, and 40 gig Maxtor) and the same problems come up on both drives, leading me to believe it's not the hard drive.**

Any Help at all would be GREATLY appreciated
~Ryan Glover

[Dodge]

First, Unhook all cards such as the Modem, sound card, etc... Just leave the Video card.

Check to make sure you have the Hard drive hooked into the Correct IDE outlet.

Then get a Win/98 bootdisk and at the A: prompt type fdisk

Delete all partitions. Recreate your partitions. Then format them.

After this is done, put you win/xp disk in and give it a try. Make sure the XP disk is Clean. Then try to run the setup....

Here's a site that talks about Dos compatibity mode.... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q130179

[rmg185]

Ok, I figured out that I was installing a driver wrong and so then I put it in right and had windows 98 running just fine, no dos compatibility mode or anything. Then I went to upgrade to XP. I figured it was probably smarter to just do a clean install, so I used fdisk and partitioned the hard drive with 1 partition then I formatted the drive and now when I tried to install XP on the partitioned, formatted hard drive... it copies the files, enters setup and then when prompted to hit enter to continue the computer just turns off before I can do anything
I'm not sure whats going on.
~Ryan

[LTU0105]

I had the same problem so this is what i did.. XP seems to be very sensitive about the hard drives partitions etc. so... reboot the computer with the cd in the drive (make sure your bios are setup to read the cd drive be4 the hard drive) and then you can format and repartition using the cd setup.

Hope this works for you! ;)

[rmg185]

How did you manage to do that if your computer shuts down before your given the option to even select which drive you want to do anything with? My computer loads everything from the CD automatically then on the screen right before I choose which drive I want to put XP on it shuts down.

[LTU0105]

Ummmm... must not have read that shutting down issue carefully... Ill do some research and get back with ya. Mine did all that except it didnt shut down.

[rmg185]

Ok, well now I've fiddled with it a lot and I've got it so that instead of shutting down the computer.. Windows setup tells me that it did not detect any hard drives to put it on and tells me to make sure that my hard drive is properly powered on and that the proper hardware configuration is there. Anyone know how to fix this one?

[LTU0105]

I guess it went from bad to worse :confused:... Ill get back to ya