Mobo help

[boogieman481]

Building new computer... numerous problems... first hard drives appear in bios but then when trying to load win xp, it says they arent there... finally started working... then as windows trys to load (before i get to partition screen) random error messages pop up... determined that memory was incompatible (still a weird error as i have built a few computers and never seen that) now i finally have win xp loaded and computer will freeze up after about 5 minutes of use.... sometimes longer, sometimes shorter... and the updates i download wont install... pretty sure the mobo is bad but want any suggestions before i send it back... thanx

Win XP home
AMD Athlon X2 3200
MSI K9N Platinum Mobo
Kingston 1GB 533 Ram
GeForce 7600 GT Vid Card

[grandman]

you've not said what HD your using, IDE or SATA. I'm not so sure it's your MoBo. I have (still am having all sorts of problems using 64 bit H/W and 32 bit S/W) and some SATA drives are giving problems....

GM

[boogieman481]

They are SATA HD... I took the mobo out and shipped it back yesturday... I hope that fixes the problem...
Oh and I made a mistake, the CPU is an AMD 64 3200... not X2 like I said before

[goldeagle2005]

For SATA disks, you need to load the drivers which come with the motherboard. when setup is loading, watch for the prompt that says 'press f6 to install a third party SCSI/RAID driver'. When this appears, press f6 and pop in the driver floppy (yes, floppy) which came with the board.

[boogieman481]

That is what I thought too. But I have built 2 computers this year (both with SATA drives) and neither mobo came with a floppy for the SATA drivers. They both came with CD only that were labeled drivers. The first computer is working fine. The current one, I loaded the CD with the drivers as soon as windows booted up.

[stephieet]

May I suggest a new MOBO?
In the ATX form factor, board architecture is paramount for my purposes, and the Intel D975XBX is a winner for several good reasons. Most notable is the position of the 24 pin motherboard power socket at the extreme upper right corner. Why, for instance, would you want a 24 conductor, bulky harness extending across the board--in the way of HD power and data cables? It's ridiculous, right? Secondly, parallel HDs are really a thing of the past, or at least they should be. This board is devoid of superfluous IDE sockets that would otherwise be aesthetically obtrusive and occupy real estate that could be (and is, in this case) reserved for print, chokes, and capacitors. Personally, I prefer host adapters over onboard RAID, but this board has all the onboard functionality any RAID devotee would need, except, perhaps, Raid5. 8 GB RAM capacity is wonderful and was, a short time ago, reserved for BTX or expanded server boards. This looks like a very clean, practical foundation for any serious builder.
Stephanie

[vicec64]

For SATA disks, you need to load the drivers which come with the motherboard. when setup is loading, watch for the prompt that says 'press f6 to install a third party SCSI/RAID driver'. When this appears, press f6 and pop in the driver floppy (yes, floppy) which came with the board.

Not for a single SATA disk OS installation. All that needs to be done is hook it up to the mainboard and controller and set optimized defaults in the bios, then navigate to the SATA section and disable RAID, run the drive in IDE emulation. That's it. I have set up 5 different brands of Nforce4 mainboards this way with a single SATA drive.

Now - if you choose RAID you need to enable RAID in the bios, and toggle off IDE emulation, then when you setup the OS this is where you use a floppy with SATA/RAID drivers and F6.

[goldeagle2005]

How do you configure it for IDE emulation? I havent seen any such option in the BIOS.

[vicec64]

Basically most all of the early SATA iteration motherboards run the native SATA controller with IDE emulation - that is it's effectively run in IDE mode and not true SATA mode - which is why on the native SATA controller you don't need a SATA disk during F6 for just one SATA drive on a non-raid situation. THis doesn't apply to many of teh add-on SATA controllers like Sil controllers (silicon image) - usually with those you need a SATA driver disk to load the OS on a SATA drive as it's non-native and does not use IDE emulation (or more commonly called in the bios *IDE mode*

[IMG]http://www.tyan.com/support/assets/images/f_s2885_raid.jpg[/IMG]