Windows installation failure?

[The_Blood_Raven]

Hello I am in the middle of upgrading the hard drive of a customer. He had an old IDE drive and I installed a 500GB SATA samsung drive. He owns a computer that I built for him which has the following:

680i LT (I know I know these suck but for $60 each I grabbed a lot)
2 9600 GTs (again good price, good performance)
Q6600 3.0 Ghz
4GB of G.skill 800 Mhz RAM 5-5-5-15
Cooler Master 690
Antec Earthwatts 650w

I took out the already perfectly working hard drive, put all bios to default and installed the hard drive without a problem then went to install Vista 64 Ultimate. It showed the HDD correctly in BIOS, and the install disk worked fine. I installed windows on it though I was not paying much attention to what was going on, never do with the installation. Came back and it had just about completed. It suddenly went into windows trying to start it with the loading bar and BSOD after a few seconds. The error is 0x0000007e which usually means that a system file is missing. I went to reinstall windows, but the hard drive came up empty (1MB used) and no matter what I do windows will not properly install from what I see. It always stops the same way at the same time. I am testing the HDD now with a bootable DOS program and it takes forever, I still believe I have an hour to go. Any suggestions or comments?

 

[Hellboy]

Hello I am in the middle of upgrading the hard drive of a customer. He had an old IDE drive and I installed a 500GB SATA samsung drive. He owns a computer that I built for him which has the following:

680i LT (I know I know these suck but for $60 each I grabbed a lot)
2 9600 GTs (again good price, good performance)
Q6600 3.0 Ghz
4GB of G.skill 800 Mhz RAM 5-5-5-15
Cooler Master 690
Antec Earthwatts 650w

I took out the already perfectly working hard drive, put all bios to default and installed the hard drive without a problem then went to install Vista 64 Ultimate. It showed the HDD correctly in BIOS, and the install disk worked fine. I installed windows on it though I was not paying much attention to what was going on, never do with the installation. Came back and it had just about completed. It suddenly went into windows trying to start it with the loading bar and BSOD after a few seconds. The error is 0x0000007e which usually means that a system file is missing. I went to reinstall windows, but the hard drive came up empty (1MB used) and no matter what I do windows will not properly install from what I see. It always stops the same way at the same time. I am testing the HDD now with a bootable DOS program and it takes forever, I still believe I have an hour to go. Any suggestions or comments?

put the old hard disk back in, does it still boot..

I had a hard drive once - can remember which brand it was.. but it was not compatible with the asus board that the guy bought from elsewhere...

It may have been a Seagate hard disk .. Cant remember but anyhow it booted first time and bsod and subsequently had to be unplugged and reconnected to make it work again... Right pain in the arse that one and the bloke wouldnt change his mobo...

Its could be the hard disk or the cable which could be faulty or even a faulty controller on the motherboard....

I have even had faulty cache ram on a hard disk which would only be accessable in a low level dos bootable recovery program...

my bets on a duff hard disk tho , get a new one and try that....

also something to consider - it could be that the mode set for sata is a sata 1 connection and needs to be connected to a sata 2... it could be a few of those, even the cable could be up the duffer....

also maybe the ram has an issue which 64 has picked up...

take out one 9600 and set it to single mode...

im picking at straws here but im not in front of the machine...

update the bios on the motherboard with the old hard disk..

let us know

 

[13thmonkey]

there's another thread on here about someone getting corruption on windows running an nvidia board, and wasn't there issues with the early versions of 6xx boards with hdd corruption, find it hard to believe it is that as it happens at the same point, i'd have thought it would be more random.

bios update?

 

[Hellboy]

also take the processor speed down from 3 ghz as 64 might be making it unstable


as i said im not in front but do try these and gimme a shout back

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Well I tested the hard drive and it came up totally error free, not even a possible cable error. I have set EVERYTHING to default so the CPU is back to 2.4, I do this before changing out any parts. I'm going to go ahead and try the other hard drive and make sure that it works. Again it seems like Vista wont install for some reason, not sure why. The PC was running the same windows before as well.

Could it be a BIOS issue? Are there any settings I should know about that would come up now and not after I have installed countless SATA drives in PCs and even on the same model of board? I will take out a GPU if need be aswell. (bitch in this case...)

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Well I took out a GPU, nothing. Then I tried installing motherboard drivers and it blue screened searching for the drivers. Going to put in the old hard drive again now.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Well the old hard drive works perfectly fine. Going to update BIOS right now.

 

[trevorvdw]

I've had blue screen crashes like that with AHCI enabled in the bios and mixing IDE and SATA under XP.

 

[ulysses35]

I think it may be related to Vista 64 not being able to be installed with 4gb of RAM - believe it or not but I had this problem and MS released a patch to enable Vista 64 to use all of your RAM.

Instll the OS with only 2gb installed.... then download the memory pathc and then add the rest of your RAM.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

HOLY ****! I totally forgot about the patch! thank you will try now!

 

[Zorg]

If the new drive and the old drive are both the same OS then ensure the default for the SATA is IDE emulation and use the DOS tools to clone the old drive to the new one.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Na I don't do clones. This drive is so screwed up right now.... missing control panel icons... 3 AIM programs installed at once... you get the idea.

 

[roofus]

on mine i totally set it up, installed OS, then sp1, powered down and installed second stick of 2 GB. dont know if it would have worked otherwise but i read the horror stories and followed their blueprint to try to avoid it.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Well this has been the most interesting installation yet. First the board did not fully work with the hard drive so after a BIOS update windows decided to install. However in middle of the installation it got a whole new BSOD error. This was fixed by taking out half the memory. Then I got a new BSOD on startup which was fixed by reinstalling windows again because the memory error must of messed something up. Now, finally, the damn thing is working. I should charge him for all 4 hours it took of troubleshooting and trying to flash the BIOS without doing it windows, but I wont...

Thanks guys, this is why I love this forum I can help people and people can help me!

 

[Zorg]

Na I don't do clones. This drive is so screwed up right now.... missing control panel icons... 3 AIM programs installed at once... you get the idea.

Agreed, if the other drive is all pigged up, then a clone won't do.

 

[roofus]

glad it worked in the end Raven. sucks to battle a computer that you cant throw across the room because it belongs to someone else.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Haha exactly roofus. I really wanted to run over that hard drive until it was dust...

 

[Hellboy]

Well this has been the most interesting installation yet. First the board did not fully work with the hard drive so after a BIOS update windows decided to install. However in middle of the installation it got a whole new BSOD error. This was fixed by taking out half the memory. Then I got a new BSOD on startup which was fixed by reinstalling windows again because the memory error must of messed something up. Now, finally, the damn thing is working. I should charge him for all 4 hours it took of troubleshooting and trying to flash the BIOS without doing it windows, but I wont...

Thanks guys, this is why I love this forum I can help people and people can help me!

thats all right just give us 2 hours of the labour money for the troubles

 

[13thmonkey]

thanks to whomever for the >4gb install in 64bit, i'll be doing it shortly, is the patch included in sp1 versions of vista 64?

 

[Hellboy]

thanks to whomever for the >4gb install in 64bit, i'll be doing it shortly, is the patch included in sp1 versions of vista 64?

jeeez even microsoft couldnt work out that everyone would have more than 4 mb in 64 bit vista..

That was the whole point going to vista 64...


Microsoft are seem to be loosing their magic touch of late ( if they did actually have some )

 

[13thmonkey]

that wasn't a sarcastic thanks to MS, but it really really should have been, good catch

 

[Hellboy]

that wasn't a sarcastic thanks to MS, but it really really should have been, good catch

I just assumed he had the latest service pack 1 already included oem disk...

dam... should never assume

 

[13thmonkey]

so sp1 should include the fix, was this the fi that stopped the gpus with large amounts of memory from consuming a matching amount of system memory thereby reducing the amountactually available to windows?

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Yep SP1 includes the patch that allows 4GB+ RAM to run. The single little update is nearly impossible to find and it will never automatically install on the system since it is not deemed "crucial"...

 

[Hellboy]

Yep SP1 includes the patch that allows 4GB+ RAM to run. The single little update is nearly impossible to find and it will never automatically install on the system since it is not deemed "crucial"...

nvidia had a muck on one of their drivers too which played around with video memory if i remember...

all past history now...