I'm building a new computer

Well I'm pissed. I've been working on this new PC since 0900 today and I cant get windows to install. No matter what I do it will blue screen when it starts the setup process. I've tried single SATA drive as IDE and still blue screens. I've tried resetting the BIOS and removing everything that was not needed.

The strange thing is that windows is hell slow at installing. A lot slower than it should be.

I'm gonna try an install on an IDE drive and see if that makes difference. I never had a PC give me this much trouble. :angry:

 

Its an asus p5k premium. I have enabled and disabled the raid controller and I did use the correct drivers for the raid when it was enabled. I'm going to try swapping out more parts. The IDE drive also failed the install. I'm thinking its the mobo but I dont know what I need to change on it. Its all set to the default settings. I cant swap out memory or video card because I dont have any extras for this type of board. I also dont have any extra SATA drives.

 

Looks like asus has screwed me. :angry: This mobo has issues with western digital drives. I knew I should have stayed away from asus. I'm currently looking for an alternative board. Preferably a gigabyte board. I have one I'm looking at now to see if it will do what I want and to see if it has any issues.

I hate computers.

 

I have the latest bios. From reading the messages on the asus forum asus has not done anything to fix this issue for a long time. In fact they say asus blames WD for the screwup.

I think I'm going to give GIGABYTE GA-P35-DQ6 a try. Looks good and cant find any issues with hard drives. I hope to have better luck with this one.

 

OK I'm back up and running with my gigabyte board and I'm a little pissed at gigabyte. I also got my Logitech G9 mouse today and I love it! Best mouse ever!

First off the packaging for the gigabyte board was top notch. I've never seen anything like it.

First issue I had was that the stock Intel CPU heatsink would not snap down. I almost broke my thumb trying to get the damn thing to snap in place. I had to bend the legs a little to finally get them to snap in place.

Next came first boot. The fans kicked on and nothing on the screen but I got the OK beep from the speaker. :angry: So the only thing I could do was replace the video card. The only one I had was a regular PCI. I got the same result with that. So I put in my PCIe card and proceeded to boot. I then thought what if my monitor is just not seeing the signal on first boot. So I turned off my monitor and back on while the PC was still on and BAM I got video. So now I figure that I have to turn on my monitor after the PC. OK thats not a big problem

Next my USB keyboard did not work so I had to go get my PS2 keyboard. Now I'm in the BIOS.

Now I found out why none of my stuff worked. Gigabyte defaulted the first video boot device to PCI! :angry: Why my PCI videocard did not display anything I have no clue and who the F@#$ is going to use a PCI card on this board as a first boot?! Anyway I fixed that issue. Next I looked at the legacy USB devices. Guess what? They were set to DISABLE! :angry: Then I fixed that issue. Why gigabyte defaulted to all old legacy crap on this performance board I have no clue.

So now everything is working and XP installs just like normal. I have one 250GB drive as my OS and three 250GB drives in a raid 5 with a stripe size of 64KB. I tested the raid drive and it seems to perform just as good as the single 250GB drive. The only real difference is that the CPU works about 1% more with the raid.

Well so far I'm happy with my new setup. I still have to install some drivers and software. Now I just have to see if I can return that SOB asus board or sell it.

 

OK I'm back up and running with my gigabyte board and I'm a little pissed at gigabyte. I also got my Logitech G9 mouse today and I love it! Best mouse ever!

First off the packaging for the gigabyte board was top notch. I've never seen anything like it.

First issue I had was that the stock Intel CPU heatsink would not snap down. I almost broke my thumb trying to get the damn thing to snap in place. I had to bend the legs a little to finally get them to snap in place.

Next came first boot. The fans kicked on and nothing on the screen but I got the OK beep from the speaker. :angry: So the only thing I could do was replace the video card. The only one I had was a regular PCI. I got the same result with that. So I put in my PCIe card and proceeded to boot. I then thought what if my monitor is just not seeing the signal on first boot. So I turned off my monitor and back on while the PC was still on and BAM I got video. So now I figure that I have to turn on my monitor after the PC. OK thats not a big problem

Next my USB keyboard did not work so I had to go get my PS2 keyboard. Now I'm in the BIOS.

Now I found out why none of my stuff worked. Gigabyte defaulted the first video boot device to PCI! :angry: Why my PCI videocard did not display anything I have no clue and who the F@#$ is going to use a PCI card on this board as a first boot?! Anyway I fixed that issue. Next I looked at the legacy USB devices. Guess what? They were set to DISABLE! :angry: Then I fixed that issue. Why gigabyte defaulted to all old legacy crap on this performance board I have no clue.

So now everything is working and XP installs just like normal. I have one 250GB drive as my OS and three 250GB drives in a raid 5 with a stripe size of 64KB. I tested the raid drive and it seems to perform just as good as the single 250GB drive. The only real difference is that the CPU works about 1% more with the raid.

Well so far I'm happy with my new setup. I still have to install some drivers and software. Now I just have to see if I can return that SOB asus board or sell it.