DESPERATE! ASUS Barebones problems!

[dbh]

Im in desperate need of your assistance.

I can't for the love of me get my barebones system to install windows XP it keeps throwing major errors.

I ordered the following which arrived today:

• Asus Vintage 2 AH2 AM2 barebones
• Athlon 64 3000+ AM2
• Corsair 512MB DDR2-667 RAM
• Western Digital 160GB SATA II HDD
• Sony 18x DVD-RW

I've noticed these parts are very similar to the Scan 3XS basic system so I'm hoping you guys can give me some insight into fixing this. I really need to get the system built as its going to a friend who is shipping this off internationally on monday.

Basically my problem is I install Windows XP SP2 and after it copies the files to the HDD to begin the installation after the reboot I get either a blue screen of death 0x0000007B error... a ntdll.dll error or it says something in WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ is corrupt !

Im only using ONE single SATA HDD would this be the cause of the problems? Do I have to have NVRAID enabled in the BIOS or can I leave it turned off, im not even sure what to do. Please please help.

I just created a new XP CD and integrated the latest nvidia drivers for the nforce 430/410 chipset (as the Vintage mobo is a M2NPV-VM) and will give that a go.

I hope your system builders etc can give me some insight into this as I'm going out on a limb and guessing that you might have put together a pc with just one sata drive in this barebones before.

Thanks



EDIT: With the new cd its saying \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM corrupt ..... ffs

[dave87]

I'd remove the Invoice number from the post and PM it to someone like ChrisP or Lee @ SCAN - just for security reasons

[Danishwonder]

if you only got one hdd turn of the raid in bios and thy again only use raid if you have more than 2hdd

[amjedm]

Do you have another stick of RAM you can you try?

A few months a go my brother's hard drive became corrupted and then he couldn't install XP again. XP was copying files across and then would blue screen. After swapping bits out, I thought one of the RAM slots had become damaged so gave him a 512MB stick and took his 2 x 256. PC was fine after that.

I tried to use one of the 256MB sticks in the past few days and have realised it was causing the problems above. The PC I'm setting up now would blue screen as well. Some other errors - it would try to boot in to Nvdia Raid, wouldn't boot from CD if it was set as Master.

[dbh]

Unfortunately I don't this pc is the only pc I have around me that is DDR2.

[dbh]

Reckon using the RAM in a different slot would help ?

[dbh]

Disabling the raid didnt help either it still corrupts after copying files over to the HDD. (Thats with NVRAID disabled entirely or with NVRAID enabled and SATA Port 1 RAID Enabled turned off)

[Danishwonder]

unless something is running out of spec. One of you parts is broken i would say first thing i would check as above is the ram

[Gibbo]

Doesn't DDR2 require 2 sticks of RAM?

[GoNz0]

set the hard drive to sata 1 speeds, 150 mbs not 300

[dbh]

Im gonna give this machine a good try again today, was too knackered to continue past midnight after faffing about and getting no where. I'll keep you posted. To change the drive to SATA one that would be a jumper on the drive Im guessing and not a BIOS option?

[GoNz0]

may be both, i can set the sata speed in bios

[dbh]

I checked the BIOS i don't see an option for SATA speed to toggle between 1 and 2, but there are other things like SATA Spread Spectrum, or toggling SATA DMA access on the ports.

[GoNz0]

might just be a jumper on the drive for u then ?

[dbh]

Sigh, I checked the back of the drive and theres no jumper plugs on it at all or is there any text etc to say what the pins do... not sure the drive came with any jumper plugs on it anyhow...

EDIT: silly me its in fine print on the sticker... but the drive still has no jumper plug ... hmm

[Phillip @ Scan]

Only samsung drives had jumpers to make them SATA 150. After reading the initial post i would say there was a memory issue but with SATA drives strange things can happen. In system build we have found that running a SATA 300 drive from a SATA 150 Controller causes lots of issues and in some cases can loose the entire partition.
hope the above helps.