From the Not enough Harddrive space thread, most of you will have read that I was having some trouble with my main system's boot drive, so I decided to use a 300GB drive also in the system as the new system disk and to buy a couple of new drives to replace that for data and files.
The two new nice shiny 500GB Seagate drives I ordered arrived yesterday so I instantly began backing up everything from the current setup ready to do a clean install. I wasn't going to do a mirror of the existing Windows install because I knew some of the system files were corrupt from the HD problems.
So I finished the backing up to an external HD. I then set to installing XP onto the existing 300GB HD, and once that was done planned to install the two new drives into the system.
All seemed to start OK. The XP install CD went about its business partitioning and formatting the drive, but then insisted that because the old IDE boot drive was still in the system as well as this SATA drive I was trying to install XP on that it needed to write the boot sector files to the old ATA drive. So I had to shut down and remove that old IDE drive and start again.
So I got back to the partitioning, formatting and then copying over of files, then it rebooted and BANG! A message after post was displaying there was an error and no OS was found. Strange. But thought I had better google it. Turns out the SATA drives over 160GB need to be set to Large instead of Auto in the Bios HD allocation settings or the Windows installer cannot correctly install the OS. Nice bug Microsoft!!!
So I get it too Large, and because it has changed it means I have to start the install again from partitioning. So that done, files copied, and reboot...
And all goes well, the install continues, I set the time, data, network settings etc... and eventually I'm in windows looking at the desktop. So I start to install the hardware drivers, but start to have some system stability about half way thought. After installing the network drivers and rebooting the system hung at the XP boot screen, but a reset got it booting again but it took a long time (very similar to the long load time trouble I was having before. I then got to the end of installing the hardware drivers with the graphics card. Fully installed that, rebooted again and half way thought Windows loading it stopped and went no further. A hard reset and BANG!...
"ERROR LOADING OPERATING SYSTEM"
On looking at the post text the SATA drive was missing! OMG! So I switched the system off, and rebooted and it was back! Windows started to boot again but then hung at the same XP logo screen. Soft reset and the drive was gone again! and the same error message!
Very strange I thought, I've never encountered this error before when installing XP. So I googled the error and discovered a very annoying issue. This drive is a 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300SO and I found lots of people posting the same problem I had (that there Maxtor SATA drives would just suddenly vanish) and guess what the problem was? Maxtor SATA harddrives were found to be unstable or incompatible with NForce4 based motherboards!!! Bugger! Exactly what my A8N-SLI Premium is using. Apparently someone at nVidia didn't quite code the nForce4 SATA controller properly and Maxtor drives not working was the end result. Luckily Seagate drives (my new drives were being reported by everyone in the posts as working fine).
So in the end I've had to ditch the Maxtor drive and have now installed the two Seagate drives and Windows is up and running very nicely.
And reading more into the Maxtor issue it would seem that a lot of the problems I was having before were completely due to the Maxtor SATA drive connected to the system as a data drive. Many people were reporting similar issues even when the drive isn't the boot drive. Strange things like the system taking a very long time to boot or freezing for no reason for a short time and then continuing what it was doing. Very odd.
So if any of you have an Maxtor SATA drives don't use them with nForce4 based motherboards! It's not worth the hassle. A shame as I have always been a big fan of Maxtor drives in the past and had they still been available I probably would have purchased those. Thank god Seagate bought them out and I had to buy their drives instead.