XP Pro on P965 installation woes. Scratching my head.

[planar3d]

I have two very similar systems. Their configuration is listed below along with some data points and preliminary conclusions.



Enermax Liberty 620W
P5B with latest BIOS 1604
E6600
2 Corsair 2GB PC6400
7950GT
X-Fi
floppy
SATA 160GB hard drive plugged into SATA1 + erased with Linux dd command
SATA DVD+-RW Plextor 712A plugged into SATA3

Memory remap feature disabled in BIOS. BIOS see only 3GB RAM as expected.
SATA mode set to IDE (not AHCI) in BIOS
Jmicon controller disabled

Fedora 7 x86_64 DVD ISO boots fine. Installation screen/process starts just fine. Interesting note: Fedora 7 installation DVD will not boot when SATA is set to AHCI.

Ultimate Boot CD 4.1.1 will not boot at all. BIOS says insert boot media and reboot system

XP Pro CD will not boot at all. Does not display the message "Press any key to boot from CD". BIOS says insert boot media and reboot system

XP Pro CD with Service Pack 2 slipstreamed into it will not boot at all. Does not display the message "Press any key to boot from CD". BIOS says insert boot media and reboot system

XP Pro CD with Service Pack 2 + Intel P965 chipset drivers + Jmicron drivers slipstreamed into it will not boot at all. Does not display the message "Press any key to boot from CD". BIOS says insert boot media and reboot system

Vista 32 Business DVD does boot. Installation process appears to start just fine but I didn't complete it because I am not moving to Vista yet.




Enermax Liberty 620W
P5B with latest BIOS 1604
E6600
2 Patriot 2GB PC6400
8600GT
floppy
SATA 250GB hard drive plugged into SATA1
IDE DVD+-RW Sony plugged into sole IDE port

Memory remap feature enabled in BIOS. BIOS sees all 4GB RAM as expected.
SATA mode set to IDE (not AHCI) in BIOS
Jmicron controller set to IDE (not RAID)

Fedora 7 x86_64 DVD ISO boots fine. Installation completed; using PC right now. All 4GB RAM visible and usable with kernel 2.6.22. Kernel 2.6.21 resulted in a kernel panic.

Ultimate Boot CD 4.1.1 boots just fine

XP Pro CD partially boots. Displays the message "Press any key to boot from CD" followed by "Setup is inspecting your configuration..." then system just sits at a blank screen. No blue screen with the license agreement.

XP Pro CD with Service Pack 2 slipstreamed into it partially boots. Displays the message "Press any key to boot from CD" followed by "Setup is inspecting your configuration..." then system just sits at a blank screen. No blue screen with the license agreement.

XP Pro CD with Service Pack 2 + Intel P965 chipset drivers + Jmicron drivers slipstreamed into it partially boots. Displays the message "Press any key to boot from CD" followed by "Setup is inspecting your configuration..." then system just sits at a blank screen. No blue screen with the license agreement.



Conclusions:
Does not appear to be a hardware issue because the Fedora Core 7 DVD boots fine on both machines. XP Pro won't boot but Vista Business will. There's some BIOS setting or (more likely) some sort of driver/patch that XP needs to work with the P965 chipset. Any ideas on what is going on here?

 

[planar3d]

Some more data points:

The P5B has 5 SATA ports: four are implemented in the P965 chipset, the fifth comes from the Jmicron controller. I connected the SATA optical drive to the fifth SATA port. In the BIOS I set the fifth port's mode to IDE and then again as RAID. In both instances I told the board to boot off the Plextor optical drive (using the F8 option to manually specify the drive) and the XP Pro SP2 CD failed to boot. BIOS comes back and tells me to insert boot media and reboot the system.

I will attempt to create XP Pro SP2 setup disks for a floppy install from: http://www.microsoft.com/downl...5368124&displaylang=en

I am not optimistic given that these floppy disk files are dated 2004. I don't expect them to have any better support for SATA than an XP CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 2. I combed through the list of post SP2 hotfixes on http://www.msfn.org/board/HOTF...SP2_Win200_t86450.html and none of the hotfixes relate to my problem.

I have little reason the suspect that my XP Pro CD is corrupt or damaged. It will boot up, start, and complete the installation process on an nforce4 based system (which was using an IDE drive). The P965 chipset has no support for IDE drives (it's SATA only) thus the reason why there's a Jmicron controller on most P965 motherboards.

All these data points are still pointing to some sort of shortcoming in XP Pro + SP2. Poor SATA support. Maybe poor P965 support (P965 did come out after SP2 but the SATA standard did not). I doubt the Plextor drive needs a firmware upgrade to boot an Windows XP disk.

Has anyone gotten XP to install on a purely SATA based system (i.e. no IDE optical drives, no using the Jmicron controller, no external/USB optical drives)?