blackduck30

also can you confirm that your windows CD is ok on your other computer

Chizl

Well, hate to do this to ya, but this MakeDisk.exe did the exact same thing to a totally different disk.

mgoldb2

He tryed booting from 6 floppy windows xp boot disks and had the same problem so I dont think it the cd.

Chizl

I have 4 CD's including one that is 64 bit.. They all do the same thing.

Chizl

Try creating a disk yourself and see what happens..

Chizl

It's 2:30 am here.. I gotta go to bed and get up in 4 hours.. Wonderful tech work.. I'll need to pick up on this tomorrow.. Thanks for all your help this far.. You have no idea how much I do appreciate it.

Chizl

I'll try the BIOS update tomorrow before I get back on.

blackduck30

I will try to create a driver disk on this end and see how I go, mgoldb2 has done a great job here so far and I take my hat off to him, I have just try'd to jump in as a 3rd wheel here

Chizl

Much thanks to you both. See ya tomorrow.

mgoldb2

Am happy to help I just regreat we could not get it to work yet. hopfully the bios upgrade will be the solution.

Thanks and I welcome any one help that might think of something am missing or forgetting.

Maybe something will come to me between tonight and tommrow. Sometime when you think about a problem to long you start to miss the obvious. Maybe with a fresh mind I have more idears.

As it stand now the only thing I got left is the bios upgrade.

blackduck30

I have just made a driver disk
I will see if I can zip it up and post it

blackduck30

there should be 2 folders and one file , you should be able to copy these straight to a floppy

Attached Files

raid.zip (133.5 KB, 4 views)

blackduck30

there should be 2 folders and one file , you should be able to copy these straight to a floppy

EDIT: winzip seperated all the folders so I will have to figure out how to get this to you

I will send you a PM ( personal message)

blackduck30

I just try'd extracting the zip again and it extracted fine in the correct folders so the zip should be fine to use

blackduck30

ok just been thinking and are just throwing some things in to check

first thought is to remove all stuff that is not essential to running so as we can eliminate any conflicks ( anything that is removed may be added back 1 at a time so as we might narrow down any failures to 1 device if it boots up with bare essentials.) , so remove any extra hard drives ( disconection is fine ), remove any usb devices such as modems, printers ect. remove any pci devices that are not essential. so really all we want is mobo, H/D's , CPU , video, ram, floppy, cdrom.

next in the bios make sure your 2 sata drives showup in the main menu
next under the advanced then onboard device config, make sure onchip Sata is enabled
in the same section make sure sata mode is set to Raid

then exit the onboard device config section and scroll down to jumper free config and disable Overclock Options and AI NOS

also make sure the boot priority is CD/raid array/floppy

also under the hard drives section in the boot section make sure that the raid array is the only thing listed there , if there is anything else disable it ( note that this is a seperate section to the boot priority, is generally under boot priority )

still under the boot tab, in the Boot Settings config, make sure Quick boot is enabled

Then make sure you exit and SAVE chages

On reboot hit the tab key to enter the raid utility, once that is up you can press F1 key to view the array status, make sure it is healthy and is bootable.

Make sure you have a Raid driver floppy ready and working

then I suppose you can try to load your O/S and if it does not freeze up keep a sharp eye out for the prompt to hit F6 to load the raid driver and follow the instructions given

These are just some things I can think of that might help

Good luck and let us know how you go

Chizl

Theres nothing plugged in that I can remove. I dont have any USB devices plugged in, no extra drives, nothing more than the computer.

OnChip SATA BOOTROM is enabled, OnBoard Promise Controller is enabled, Operation Mode is RAID Mode.

I dont have a jumper free config section. My only options are:
* CPU Confi
* Chipset
* Onboard Devices Config
* PCIPnP
* System Frequency/Voltage Config
* Speech Config
* Instant Music Config

Done

It is..

It also is..

I've just updated my bios from 1003 to 1017 and guess what.. I can get past the Windows Setup screen now.. I have all the standard window questions..

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!! I would have never thought bios update would keep windows from installing.. Makes no since to me..

mgoldb2

Glad the bios update worked. I just regreat that the bios update was the last idear I gave you instead of near the front.

I think you should be good to go now. We fixed the overheating problem and windows is now installing. Let us know if any other problems come up but I think there a good chance you will have a working computer now that you very happy with. The specs on your computer great.

One last thing I recommend cleaning your HSF of dust maybe once a mounth to make sure it continues to cool your computer well.

blackduck30

did you get a driver disk made OK, I also find it surprising that it was the bios if you had the system running with raid previous, it may have become corrupted though. I do not take bios update lightly as I have seen a lot go wrong so I think it was wise to explore other avenue's beforhand.

Glad to hear all worked out well

mgoldb2

Yeah that one of the main reason I did not say the BIOS update idear until I ran out of other idears. On the good side that motherboard a little safer then most for bios update. Unlike most motherboards if you skew up the update on that one the computer will still boot to a screen that will allow you to reflash the bios. I think ASUS advertised this feature as CRASHFREE bios.

Chizl

I'm acctually typing to you guy from my old door stop.. Got XP installed on it and everything is running fine, but I at no time installed the raid drivers.. Windows must of picked it up. I went back and deleted the raid and made it a raid 0 for speed, hell this is a gamming box, I dont care about loosing data..


I talked to a buddy of mine and the only thing we could come up with is Alienware imaged the box, therefore they wouldn't have had this issue, they kind of by passed the issue. What we are guessing is that the BIOS didn't support Raid very well, or maybe not the raid type I had, not sure, but once I updated it, everything came into place.

I've taken the Overclocking to Manual FSB 200 and left everything else default.. Hopefully that will keep me from getting over clocking errors, then again that may have been from the lack of BIOS update as well. We'll see..

I'll let the run from about 2 weeks and if I dont see the problems I was seeing, I'm going to call up Alienware and give them an ear full.

Thanks alot guys.. If you ever need anything, give me a ring over at www.Chizl.com, I have a contact me there.. I'm a software engineer/developer for the last 20 years and can knock something out pretty quickly.. I've created many little utilities over the last 10 years for network guys to make their job a bit easier..