Unable to get new comp going!!

[Sam1]

Hi guys, wonder if you can help me i'm nearly pulling my hair out with this situation.

I'm building a new comp, i'll give you a list of what its made up of...

Processor: P4 3.4Ghz

Mobo: Soltek SL-87CW-FL (springdale canterwood)

Memory: Kingston hyper DDR400 2 matched sticks 1028Mb

Hard Drive 1: WD 10,000rpm mb cache 74.3Gb (S-ATA)

Hard Drive 2: Maxtor 7,200rpm 8mb cache 250Gb (IDE)

Audio: Sound Blaster Audigy Pro

CD-ROM 1: NEC DVD Burner (I forget the version now, latest one the dual layer)

CD-ROM 2: BEC CD Burner

Graphics: Geforce FX-5200 (borrowing this as I am waiting for my GeForce 6800 ultra to get to me)

PSU: 550Watt

Thats pretty much it, I'm trying to install her with Windows XP Pro, now I started her up for the first time and everything was going smoothly until I got into the XP blue setup screen. Where it crashed.

So I re-booted and after some fiddling in BIOS etc the setup started to load up but then when it got to initilizing I got 0x0000007f error, which was nasty, I know that this can be over-heating, or memory problems I've read all about it but I can't see how. Everything in the machine is new and its not once been actually used within an OS.

The memory check on startup reads fine, so can't be a mem problem, the CPU is getting plenty of cooling, can't be over-heating. Surely if it was a hardware problem it wouldn't effect the actual installation of XP if it was just one of the hard drives or something. I mean I dunno i'm not the brightest person on the planet when it comes to these things but this issue is really getting to me. Please help people!

 

[airiox]

Well here is a few things you can try.

While installing unplug EVERYTHING exept your hard drive and your cd drive.

Also if that doesnt work try installing it on your IDE drive, I know Sata is strange somtimes when it comes to installing OS's.

Also try with only one stick of Ram in place.

And finally it could just be windows.

Have a freind download a free copy of Suse personal 9.1 and check that out.

If still no worky, then your screwed.

 

[Sam1]

Excellent I've actually got somewhere, although my SATA drive has still showed up as third master, I unplugged the IDE HD and then took out my secondary CD-ROM.

Changed the jumper settings on the SATA which was a pain coz no manual on there settings and nothing i could find online. But the OS is now installing on the SATA drive which is what i'm looking for at the end of the day.

After installation will it be pretty straight forward getting my IDE HD setup as secondary do you think?

Thanks for your help,

 

[0x54]

windows crashing during install isnt anything rare ;\

try another os.

www.stresslinux.org is handy for finding dud hardware.

 

[Sam1]

I've got XP Pro formatting the western digital SATA at the moment, all seems ok. The only problem is its not primary master but third master, I didn't know if this would effect things down the line putting in my additional CD-ROM and hard drive as its formatting the drive the H:\ ???

This being my system hard drive thats currently formatting, the IDE will go in later as data storage.

 

[Lord Kalthorn]

You can change the name of the hard Drive later; doesn't really matter whether its the Third Master other than that.

If you go to Administration Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management > then right click on the Drive after its formatted and chose a letter for it.