Such a Tease

[And_so_it_goes]

Well, I finaly got a new comp, well new everything except for vid and sound cards. It's pretty sweet: 939 pin amd 64 3000+, gigabyte K8NS ultra mobo, 1 gig corsair xms ddr, 80 gig seagate HD, combo cdrw/dvd drive, nice case. All this put together for just over seven hundred clams from cyberpower. For now i'm sticking with my gforce 4 ti 4800 se vid card and soundblaster audigy sound. I was so exicited when it arrived last Thursday, but since then i have been pretty frusterated in trying to get everything up and running. Cyberpower has been no help; it's as if their tech department consists of one guy who is constantly out to lunch. So, I'm turning to the good and knowledgeable graces of the vgr people for guidance. Your help would be much appreciated...

Here are my problems so far:
One: Installing windows xp home.
Two: Getting my vid card drivers to work
Three: Getting online even on win 98 and without vid card fully installed

On my old computer, the one i'm using now, I originally installed a copy of win 98 se and later installed the win xp home upgrade. It never gave me any problems on this machine which uses an amd athlon 1800+ chipset and the same vid card. When I first attempted to install windows xp on my new comp without bothering to install win 98 first (which you don't need to do, supposedly, they simply ask to check for your win 98 disk durring the process) everything seemed to go fine untill I got to the disk partition selection part. Instead of listing partitions for me to either delete or copy onto, I get the following repeated over and over: "Unknown disk (No disk in drive)" The only thing for me to do at this point is hit enter and this is when the screen turns dark blue and I get the fatal error message that windows needs to shut down and the install is abandoned. At the bottom of the screen I get: Stop: 0x0000008E.
After going through that process a couple of times, not knowing what else to do, and giving up on it I decided to try installing win 98 and then try upgrading to xp from there. I formatted the HD with win 98 and then installed it without any noticeable problems (durring installation). However, once win 98 was installed, the trouble began. For some reason, the onboard ethernet connection is not detected in my internet connections options and I am unable to get online. Also, when I try to install my vid card drivers the computer must restart for the settings to take effect. But when it restarts the win 98 loading screen shows up like it was tie-dyed and I have to restart in safe mode and abandon the drivers. Trying to install my win xp upgrade on top of my win 98 gets me results almost identical to a fresh win xp install attempt. I'm given "unknown disk" instead of partitioning space and the fatal error message comes up this time reading: stop: 0x0000007B. And once again, I have to abandon the xp installation.
So, I am basically at a loss here. Any ideas on what might be going wrong? Is my HD corrupt? I scanned it with the win 98 utility and nothing came up wrong... Did cyberpower send me faulty hardware? Apparently it went through 2 quality control checks and passed. Does something need to be changed in BIOS, or with the SATA drivers? I have a feeling that if I could just get it to recognize the appropriate partitions other things would fall into place...
Well, I have a number of games that I've been holding off on installing untill I get this thing running. Please let me know of anything that might help.

[Renzatic Gear]

Ahhh, you have a SATA drive. I had that exact same problem with a friends comp awhile back.

Win XP won't pick up a SATA drive at all unless you install the drivers for it right when you first start installing the OS (it'll prompt you saying something along the lines of "if you want to install extra hardware now please hit F3 and insert disk"). Find the disk, pop it in the A drive, let XP install it, then it'll go on it's merry way.

[DBS]

It is a quick prompt at the beginning of the OS installation. Easy to miss...as is the one to delete the old windows installation and start fresh. I did that and it drove me nutz.


Also your ethernet connection might need drivers installed to recognize it. In your device manager do you have any exclamation points ? Sometimes it is a pain figuring out what needs a driver although Win XP is an improvement in this area.

My computer has a built in nic but I still need the Intel driver loaded for instance. Good luck and hopefully you will be up and gaming soon !

[And_so_it_goes]

Thanks, guys. Hopefully this is all that is wrong and it will be a quick fix. I don't have time to mess with anything right now, but I'll get on it this evening and see how it goes. I don't even know what SATA means, but cyberpower did include a floppy disk in the packaging that is labeled SATA drivers. I thought this stuff should be installed once the opperating system is up but apparently it should be installed before that. I'll keep my eye out for the prompt. Do you think that I should format my drive again, getting rid of win 98, and start completely fresh?
Again, thanks for the help. I'll let you know how things turn out.

[And_so_it_goes]

Well, I installed the SATA drivers and was able to get win xp running, but there are still some problems. They are:
One: no ethernet connection like DBS mentioned. I assumed cyberpower would include a motherboard cdrom with all the drivers on it but there was none in the packaging. Are the drivers located somewhere else? Any ideas on what I can do, to get my device manager to recognize my ethernet connection?
Two: My vid card runs only in pci mode and I can't seem to change it over to agp. I'm thinking this might also be a driver issue? Other than that, my msi/nvidia driver seemed to install fine, the card is recognized for what it is and seems to function normally, if a bit slower.
One final concern, and this may also be contributing to my problems: When i started installing win xp and and I put in the floppy disk to install the SATA drivers I was presented with four installation options to choose:
1: Intel (R) 82801FR SATA RAID controller for win xp
2: Intel (R) 82801FR SATA AHCI controller for win xp
3: Intel (R) 82801ER SATA RAID controller for win xp
4: Silicon Image Sil 3112 SATA RAID controller for win xp
Not having much confidence in which to choose (was I supposed to install them all?) I picked number 4 simply because I am running an AMD and not an Intel processor. (I know this probably doesn't make sense.) Should I have installed a different one, or all of them?

Cyberpower has still been almost no help to me, so if anyone has advice about any of the above it would be greatly appreciated.

[Renzatic Gear]

I would've picked option 1, it'll probably give you more stable performance overall since it's an Intel driver...doesn't matter about the CPU.

That is kinda dumb that Cyberpower wouldn't include your mobo drivers when they shipped it out to you. Best you can do is go to Gigabyte's website and see if you can find drivers for it there.

[And_so_it_goes]

Thanks, Renz. I got the drivers from gigabyte and will try to transfer them over to my new comp. I'm going to start over, again, and go with the first intel option. I want to have everything perfect, or as close to it as I can get, before I activate xp with microsoft.

Any advice on the video card issue? Sure would be nice to have agp.

[Renzatic Gear]

Cyberpower is pretty flaky when it comes to sending the right graphics card. Pop open the case and make sure it's an AGP card before you assume it's an OS issue. I don't recall a G4 4800 coming in a PCI flavor, but...meh...best to check just to make sure. It wouldn't hurt to reseat the card either, it could've been jostled during shipping.

If it is then check your bios for any odd settings that might be forcing your card to run in PCI mode. I can't think of any specific setting off the top of my head, but I seem to remember that there's a few in there that could be set as such.

[And_so_it_goes]

Cyberpower is pretty flaky when it comes to sending the right graphics card. Pop open the case and make sure it's an AGP card before you assume it's an OS issue. I don't recall a G4 4800 coming in a PCI flavor, but...meh...best to check just to make sure. It wouldn't hurt to reseat the card either, it could've been jostled during shipping.

If it is then check your bios for any odd settings that might be forcing your card to run in PCI mode. I can't think of any specific setting off the top of my head, but I seem to remember that there's a few in there that could be set as such.

Actually, I didn't get a vid card from them, I'm just using my old one. It ran in agp on my old comp and I am sure it supports 8x agp.
I checked my bios settings and the only obvious things I came accross seem set to support agp. I think perhaps that an agp driver still needs to be installed for my mainboard, that until it gets this driver it won't any support any card in agp mode. But I'm going to try reinstalling the card and seeing what happens. I have an old nvidia mx 440 card which is agp. I guess I could put that in and see if it comes up as agp. We'll see.
Thanks for the help. If there is any more advice I am all ears.

[Mochan]

Good grief, this is why I buy parts from a shop down the street instead of ordering online. =_=

For the Ethernet issue, I don't have experience with XP Home but what I do with XP Pro is simply create a new connection under Networking Options (or something like that).

From there a wizard will activate asking you what kind of connection to make. I assume you have something like a DSL Ethernet connection or something.

Just pick the Broadband options (I don't remember them all but they make easy sense) and then put in your login information and give the connection a name. That should do it.

If you really have trouble with it, you should call your ISP tech support for help in setting up with Windows XP.

[And_so_it_goes]

Well, I've got my ethernet up and running (finally). Really, the only thing I need now is to get my vid card to run in agp mode instead of pci.

[And_so_it_goes]

Problem fixed. I just hope my bios is still stable after all driver installation and flashing I put it through.

[DBS]

Glad you got it all up and running. Sucks that they shipped it in that state though. Usually when you get it new it comes set up correctly until we start messing with things :) I finally got mine set up ok as well as I recently got dsl and recently got a trojan I could not get rid of. Kept loading crap in the background without authorization or anything and was totally unstoppable even using adaware and Norton virus. I had to start from scratch and after initially screwing up my install by doing a duplicate install as I wanted a clean install. Still some of the other stuff stayed on here but I guess it is ok. I am enjoying the dsl but everyone here is sick like dogs so I haven't been online much lately. Figures...I get sick for the weekend.

[And_so_it_goes]

Yeah, it seems cyberpower isn't the best company when it comes to the details of customer assistance. I went with them only because I could find what I was looking for for least amount of money already put together. And the shipping was even free. As of now, I'm happy with what I have, but it sure wasn't easy to get to this point, and all the help I recieved came from other other sources- like here. Still, not everything is as perfect as I want it to be. Sometimes my comp won't make it past certain stages when starting up and I have to keep restarting until it gets it right.
The good news is my games run alot faster and smoother, although maybe not as much as I'd hoped for. Right now my bottleneck is my old vid card and it looks like sometime soon I'll have to throw down for something more modern. Hope you feel better for work on Monday, lol...

[moya]

Hmmm. At what point does your PC get stuck at startup? Does it get to Windows... or...?

[And_so_it_goes]

Sometimes it doesn't make it past the first bios screen where it is detecting the IDE drives. Sometimes it gets stuck right where the first black win xp screen with the blue bar loading thing begins to fade in. It will just stay at a very faint picture (this is hard to explain) and not come in all the way and start loading. Once I make it past that I'm fine. However, the last few times I booted up I haven't had any problems. Hopefully that trend will continue.

[Renzatic Gear]

It could possibly be because of the SATA drivers you installed. It's a wild guess, but it's the one that sticks out in my head the most right now.