I have bought a GA-G33M-DS2R to accompany a e4300 for a htpc build. I am having real problems installing vista premium with this board
the setup is:
GA-G33M-DS2R
E4300
2 x 1gb xms2 corsiar
250gb maxtor drive
Elonex Artisan case
To begin with i couldn't install vista at all with sata AHCI tuned in the bios. Googling found this to be a common problem a that the drivers need to be installed in the vista installation process. This didnt work for me - whenever i installed the drivers vista lost sight of the drives
In the end i disabled AHCI and gave up on using it.
With AHCI disables the vista installation starts ok but then takes a long time to get to the drive selection screen, from then on it installs slowly (slower than other vista instalations i have done) but seems to install ok.
Once it vista has booted for the first time i get further problems.
Trying to read the motherboard cd to install the chipset and other drivers makes windows explorer freeze or crash.
Windows update can download files but the process sticks at the creating restore point.
The partitions that i make with the vista installation process is unformated and vista cannot seem to format it.
Any cds in the drive either cannot be recognised or freeze the system up when
It seems to be some issue with the sata controllers but i managed to install the drivers in safe mode and i still get the same problems.
Basically any attempt to use the cd drive causes problems (even thought it installed from there), and anything other that basic hard drive access (like formtting etc) seems to cause problems too.
I would be happy to return the board to scan and choose another with a different sata controller, but i'm concerned that the board wouldnt be classed as faulty as the bios sees the disks fine.
Any ideas or similar experiances?