Frustrated.......

[Beemer]

Alright, I go out and get doom3 - woot! I come home to find a WD raptor sitting on my desk - double woot! So I decide to see how nice these two play together :D I proceed to do an install of windows on the raptor, I make it all the way through and come up to boot. Ok so the anticipation is getting to me now, I have windows I figure I ll just install doom3 and play it the rest of the night :twisted: So the bios posts, black screen comes up, then nothing. No Windows load screen, it just sits there. I tried installing again - I used the sata raid drivers for my board - nothing. Thought I will mess with this later, and just install it on the seagate. Well a system file was corrupt on that and being that I saved all important data to another partition I went ahead and formated that drive. So I have no OS right now, and I am really wanting to get the raptor working. It makes it all the way through install (loads windows the first time to finish the installation - prompts for cd key, time, etc. Once this finishes it reboots and big fat nothing. Posts just fine, but blank screen and just sits there after that. Anyone have any ideas?????

I just wanted to play doom 3!!!!! :cry:

[jurtje]

install windows with only the raptor connected, make sure in the bios it's set as 1st boot device, install the newest drivers with F6.

that should do yhe trick

[undergroundtech]

You need to install the SATA drivers before you load windows.

When you first begin to install windows it should ask if you want to load SCSI drivers, ect.. Thats when you want to install the drivers for your SATA.

Update:
You may want to first check and see if there has been a more recent driver than what is on the CD.
Its been my experience that they are difficult to update once the OS is installed.

[Beemer]

I dissconnected my other drive last night so that only the raptor was connected. I also installed the sata drivers before windows loaded - f6 at the first screen. The only thing I havent tried is a new driver d/l. Windows sees the drive, I am able to install windows on it. It just wont load windows after the installation is complete.

[jurtje]

it still sounds to me as a boot problem. Windows sees the drive fine, but as soon as it restarts, the compu isn't able to find a bot drive and therefore windows installation won't continue.

Checked BIOS?

[Roadracer_4ever]

Possibly check and see if there is a BIOS update in regards to the Raptor drives. I know my Epox board had issues with them as well, and the BIOS wasn't recognizing them properly.

[Beemer]

Well, I am in the process of updating the bios from v13 to v16. I doubt this will work b/c v13 was out in march, so they should have had any raptor issues resolved by then. I tried setting the HD as the first boot device to no avail....

[Beemer]

Updated bios to latest version - nothing

[Alfonse]

My only suggestion would be to head onto the abit-usa.com forums, there seem to be a lot of problems relating to SATA drives over there.

[Beemer]

Just sent tech support an email......

[jurtje]

Can you boot onto the raptor, by any means? DOS, Linux, or whatever? Have you turned off both IDE channels?

[Roadracer_4ever]

Can you boot onto the raptor, by any means? DOS, Linux, or whatever? Have you turned off both IDE channels?

Or at least set the SCSI drive as your first boot device in the BIOS?

[Beemer]

HD was set to first boot device, moved it back when that didnt work.


I can log into it using the windows recovery console. Don't know what that tells ya.

[Roadracer_4ever]

HD was set to first boot device, moved it back when that didnt work.


I can log into it using the windows recovery console. Don't know what that tells ya.

Possibly d/l the drive tools from the WD website and test it out, and or possibly use their latest RAID drivers from there for it. Just a thought.

[Beemer]

Went there and didnt see anything - got a link?

[Beemer]

Ok, windows installs through the blue screen. It loads the first time and shows the splash screen and then finishes the installation. So wouldnt that mean that windows was able to boot from the raptor to finish the install?

Right now windows should be completely installed, I just cant boot into it.

[undergroundtech]

Strange...Have you tried switching SATA channels?

Also WD has a free 30 or 60 installation support, you might see if they can come up with something we havn't thought of.... Though I really hate calling them unless its absolutely necessary.

[Roadracer_4ever]

Went there and didnt see anything - got a link?

http://support.wdc.com/download/

down near the bottom of the page are some downloads of interest in regards to drives of a certain size yadda yadda that may have trouble installing and so on....may be your fix, the drivers are in regards to RAID controllers etc as well.

[hafaphoto]

I am a noob, so don't quote me! When I reinstall windows, I have to go back to the EIDE cable, get windows working, then switch to SATA (1 drive). Probably me installing stuff wrong, but it might get you going for Doom3.

[jurtje]

Wait, during installation windows is able to restart and continue with the installation?

[playafly187]

stupid question, but can you boot into safe mode?

[siq]

Does it smoke in dos?... oh wait

[Beemer]

Wait, during installation windows is able to restart and continue with the installation?

Yes

stupid question, but can you boot into safe mode?

No I can not boot into safemode - it doesnt make it that far.

[jurtje]

Have you tried making a new boot sector with bootcfg /rebuild in the recovery console?

I'm talking out of my ass now, I really have no idea what is going on. Isn't Google helpful?

[Beemer]

Well, IT WORKS!!!!!!!!! Ok, here is the explanation for any of those with an IC7-Max3 and a raptor that will not boot after installing windows. First you have to connect to the 3rd sata raid port which is controlled by silicon image sata/raid controler. For some reason the onboard sata (ports 1 and 2) will not work. Then in the bios under advanced bios features, you have to allow boot from sata raid. There are options to allow from PCI, Onboard sata, and Sata Raid. You want the later of these. Bam! your working :wink:

[jurtje]

Thank God, I was beginning to worry already.
I always thought it was some kind of BIOS problem.

[Beemer]

Yeah, me too, but I had tried everything that came to mind. Just one of those new things you have to deal with when your using sata :lol:

[undergroundtech]

Glad to hear you got it going.....however, they sure didn't want to make it easy.

[siq]

Seems like ABit better take care of this before it starts getting out of hand with new hds.

[Beemer]

I believe that it is only with the raptors, my seagate barracuda sata drive worked just fine. I have heard a lot of complaints about raptor/abit combos though.