Metropoulos Forum

Here's the spec of the PC:

AMD Athlon64 3000+ processor
Winfast NF3250K8AA/NF3250GK8AA motherboard
1Gb Crucial, 512MB Belkin? DDR400 PC3200 memory (total 1.5Gb)
Maxtor 7V300F0 300GB SATA300 hard drive

I finished building this PC this week, and I was aware of the problems XP has with SATA drives (ie lack of drivers for controller). Consequently I put into the PC an older floppy disk drive I had, didn't line up perfect, but it worked ok.

I first tried installing a copy of XP Professional (no service packs), using the provided floppy disc "nVIDIA NF3 RAID Driver" after pressing F6. The installation worked, but it was slow to load and only recognised 127/131GB of the 300GB SATA hard drive. After I had it running the first time, I installed some drivers from the provided CD.

I then restarted the computer, and ever since couldn't get XP to load to the logon screen, it only ever reaches the XP loading screen and then I got a blue screen error citing "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME". When I tried to load anything like safe mode, it crashed after listing some drivers. Using last known good configuration OR normal windows xp loading, it gave me the blue screen error. The PC seems to take forever to do anything.

I tried removing the partition, but the PC told me that wasn't possible. I also couldn't repair the partition.

Consequently, I went and invested in Windows XP Home SP2 later in the week, and tried installing that. If I tried loading the drivers from the floppy by pressing F6 before the installation, by the time I got to creating/deleting the partitions, the setup program told me it couldn't find a hard drive. However, I found that XP SP2 could get through that stage and install the drivers without my floppy disk, so I went along with that.

The PC still went slowly when on Windows XP loading screens, but went through the setup with the fancy GUI fine and up to speed. I got into Windows XP with my new user account, and went along installing things from the driver CD again. Prompted to restart, ok, computer restarts.

Now I'm getting the extremely slow loading times again, can't load safe mode, and the bootup never gets past the XP loading screen. However, unlike with XP Pro SP0, with XP Home SP2 instead of a blue screen freeze citing "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME", I get a black screen for ages then it just restarts and the cycle begins again. No matter whether I choose last known good configuration or normal XP boot up it does the same thing. I can't get safe mode to work either.

This PC's killing me slowly inside...

Here's the things I think it *might* be, but don't really know and have no method of checking:

• Faulty Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drive
• Floppy drive isn't working properly, so doesn't load the drivers correctly, and the Windows XP Home SP2 drivers aren't up to doing the job properly (ie they get through install ok but then that's all they do)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Sounds like a motherboard driver issue. If you are only usisng one hard drive no need for the raid drivers. SATA drives are kinda a pain to get going sometimes. Any time I installed one SATA drive on a machine that had a raid controller, I didn't install the raid drivers. Reset cmos to default and try to put only one partition on the drive to test it. Check the boot sequencece.

I've tried different boot sequences, but I usually leave it at hard drive > CD > floppy.

I've left the RAID options in the BIOS as disabled, but even if I only tried installing XP SP2 with the SATA controller driver and not the RAID driver, it still wouldn't work unless I installed NONE of the drivers from the floppy.

I've only ever been using one partition on the hard drive, every time I've created an NTFS partition using the slow/thorough method.

Could the problem be that the 300gb HDD is SATA/300, and the motherboard only has support for SATA/150? I understand that SATA/300 is backwards compatible, but is there anything I might need to do to the hard drive or do i need to update the bios to get it to work right?