K8NS ultra 939 cant load windows

[calaverasgrande]

I have a Gigabyte K8NS ultra 939 (nforce 3 250gb, socket 939)
I had this machine running perfectly as win2k on a raid 1 array, mounted on the sil3512 SATA controller, with a 2nd raid 1 array for files for the last year or so. Then I upgraded to a dual core opty 165. I also decided it was time to use the extra partition to add XP64 and make a dual boot.
Now everything is hosed. The Xp64 install somehow messed up the drive lettering, the partition tables the MBR? everything! Now I have no functioning windows on any partition.
When I try to install windows (XP64 or 2k) it does not recognize the sata drives. Regardless of whether it is setup as a raid array or discrete drives. When I try to install using the f6 floppy it will recognize the drives, and act like it can install. But when it gets to the part where it asks you to select the partition, it does not recognize any partitions on tthe drives or arrays. I will "D" delete and then "L" confirm the delete. Then "C" create a partition. It never gets to a dialogue where you can format it, nor does it try to format it itself. It just says that it cant recognize the filesystem. and prompts me to delete (and create) the partition.
What is up? I made this install before. I am generally pretty adept at computers. Is their some arcane formatting procedure I need to do to undo some evil XP64 has wreaked on my hard drives?
PS. I really need this to eventually get to dual boot on mirrored drives.

any ideas? anybody else hit the same snag?

 

[allhell]

Flash your BIOS to at least version 9 &you will be ok. Also make sure you have the correct SI drivers. You can get them from GigaBytes site.
I will definately give you headaches or not work with 6 or below unless you know some trick.

 

[calaverasgrande]

Flash your BIOS to at least version 9 &you will be ok. Also make sure you have the correct SI drivers. You can get them from GigaBytes site.
I will definately give you headaches or not work with 6 or below unless you know some trick.

yeah, I upgraded the bios to the latest one several months ago, before I got my dual core opty 165.
I will double check to be sure it hasnt defaulted to some older backup bios.

 

[allhell]

Ther was 1 thing I noticed with mine, If any drives were attached to the NVidia controller it would always try to install windows there no matter what was selected in the BIOS so you have to disable it untill windows has been installed. Strange things happen also if you have an add in card for sata drives too.
Even tho I was able to install Xp on mine, I ended up Just cloning my RAID array from a similar PC & just update a few drivers & it was ok.

 

[badge]

I have a Gigabyte K8NS ultra 939 (nforce 3 250gb, socket 939)
I had this machine running perfectly as win2k on a raid 1 array, mounted on the sil3512 SATA controller, with a 2nd raid 1 array for files for the last year or so. Then I upgraded to a dual core opty 165. I also decided it was time to use the extra partition to add XP64 and make a dual boot.
Now everything is hosed. The Xp64 install somehow messed up the drive lettering, the partition tables the MBR? everything! Now I have no functioning windows on any partition.
When I try to install windows (XP64 or 2k) it does not recognize the sata drives. Regardless of whether it is setup as a raid array or discrete drives. When I try to install using the f6 floppy it will recognize the drives, and act like it can install. But when it gets to the part where it asks you to select the partition, it does not recognize any partitions on tthe drives or arrays. I will "D" delete and then "L" confirm the delete. Then "C" create a partition. It never gets to a dialogue where you can format it, nor does it try to format it itself. It just says that it cant recognize the filesystem. and prompts me to delete (and create) the partition.
What is up? I made this install before. I am generally pretty adept at computers. Is their some arcane formatting procedure I need to do to undo some evil XP64 has wreaked on my hard drives?
PS. I really need this to eventually get to dual boot on mirrored drives.

any ideas? anybody else hit the same snag?

Ran into trouble installing windows xp pro. I can tell you I stuck in a different windows xp disk and windows loaded right up. HTH.

EDIT: I also returned that MB. The first xp pro loaded right up on the new board.

 

[calaverasgrande]

thanks
I tried Win2k and XP64. They both just can see the drive enough to partition it, but not enough to format it. When it fdoes partition, I come back and its not a "recognizable partition".

 

[badge]

My MB was new out of the box. I could delete the existing partition on my HD. Create a new partition. And format. I would do all tha. Then I would let the winmdows CD load all the installation files and reboot the computer to begin loading widows. Then it would hang before beginning installation with the message, 'Windows OS has encountered an error. Like 15 times. Anyway, I had a different windows CD there and stuck it in and it loaded right up. I updated it and used it for the night. Tore it down the next day and retyurned the MB. Got the new MB and loaded the first XP Pro right on there!

Are your HD's Western Digital? If so, try downloading their software online. Data Lifeguard tools. Run it and let it partition the HDs. maxtor has a similar tool. HTH.

 

[badge]

Here's Western digital tools. Make a Floppy and boot to it. That's what I did.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

 

[badge]

Made me think of something. My Windows xp pro disk has sp 2. The windows xp home disk that loaded up did not have sp2.

 

[calaverasgrande]

well I tackled it again last night.
I went into the bios and enabled raid,
then low level formatted each drive from the raid bios.
then rebooted into the xp64 disc.
hit f6 very early (as per advice on another post)
this time besides asking for a floppy with the device driver it also asked me to specify which HAL to use? Never seen that one before.
Specified multiprocessor
it ate the sataraid driver fine and loaded windows no problem.
Tonight I will try and get win 2000 on the 2nd partition.
I know you are supposed to go from oldest to more recent when installing a dual boot, but hopefully this will work. Maybe I'll have to do a repair install on XP64 afterwards?
wish me luck!
PS the bios is F10
PPS the operton 165 is an insane overclocker! Before I had multi enabled I had it overclocked to 2.7 on one core, stock voltage. I am confident when I get the zalman 9500 or some other such behemoth on there it will hit 2.8-3.0 on both cores.
Dual core, dual boot, 2x raid 1 arrays.
Its gigabytes "dual miracle"

 

[badge]

First of all luck. A couple of questions. Do the HD's being prepared for RAID have to be formatted within the RAID setup program? And do you think this is the reason you could not cnfigure and load windows 64 on the RAID configuration before. BTW, I have never set up a RAID configuration myself. Just read the instructions once.

 

[calaverasgrande]

First of all luck. A couple of questions. Do the HD's being prepared for RAID have to be formatted within the RAID setup program? And do you think this is the reason you could not cnfigure and load windows 64 on the RAID configuration before. BTW, I have never set up a RAID configuration myself. Just read the instructions once.

first of all, I finally licked it. I got win2k and xp 64 installed and running last night. Havent installed any drivers or apps yet, so I am not 100% positive that there isnt anything amiss. But I booted into each one and browsed files, played freecell etc.
I ended up fromatting the drives from the sil3512 raid chips bios(not the program on the cdrom). Then I installed Xp64 on the first partition. Then I booted into it to be sure it runs. Then I installed win2k on the 2nd partition. At this point I start getting the boot choices screen, but only 2k can boot, when I try and boot into XP64 iget an ntoskrnl error. So I did some reading up. Mostly here and on extremesystems. Seems everybody has their heads in their behinds on this one. They have all these suggestions about how to modify boot.ini with this or that command or swtich, most of which were wrong (my favorite was the one thats said fatsexecute=optin) There were a couple good tips I picked up, I'll add them in when I get home.
I edited my boot.ini the old fashioned way, I booted into win2k and used notepad. Then I inserted the xp64 disk and manually copied over the ntldr and a couple other files from the i386 directory. rebooted
no sweat. both choices work. No need to use recovery console, bootcfg etc.
about raid, I have been using them for about 7 years now. Ever since I lost a 384mb song file which became corrupted. Havent had a problem since, but then I also overbuild my music workstations, so I am not really pushing my power supply, cpu or ram to the point where they generate errors.