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Work Log 9-30-2007
Mix Master Meatloaf's Hard drive debacle
My friend Mix Master got a new hard drive from NewEgg the other day and he wanted some help with the install. The plan was to install a clean OS Windows XP 64bit using his current gamer and adding a new 320gig SATA II. Easy enough. Well we where wrong. Unfortunately his motherboard does not support SATA II so when trying to use the new drive it would not be recognized by the SATA bus. On to Plan two I have a few SATA one drives floating around so we used one. The drive was identified from the SATS controller and the Maxtor Drive test showed the drive was fine. Now to load Windows XP 64bit. My buddy has an ABIT AV8 K8T800 with the south bridge chipset VIA Intel v8327. So I went to ABIT's website only to find that the Windows Installation floppy only supports 32 bit. So being resourceful I went to a few other manufacturers that have K8T800 motherboards like the ASUS A8V only to find tha same problem. I was able to find 64 bit drivers but none that would work for the installation.
At this point a few hours had passed and I was left with few options luckily his old hard drive was still intact and was running fine so we decided to make the best of a bad thing and just install the second SATA drive so he could have more games on this system. Wouldn't you know it that went a little south as well. After installing the drive the system wouldn't complete the post. I tried everything but the only way to get the system to boot was to unhook the new drive that was until I tried something that makes absolutely no sense I made the drive I wanted to boot from on Bus 1 and put the new drive on SATA Bus 0 and wouldn't you know it the system booted fine and we where able to tweak some stuff and format the new drive right from the Computer Manager.
With all that chaos out of the way this seemingly easy job turned into a 4 to 5 hour trial and error bonanza and the outcome was a solution that had I done it to begin with it would have taken 10 min tops. You might be wondering what we did with the SATA II drive well it worked in my external drive enclosure so I suggested he go and purchase an enclosure for 20 or 30 USD so he has a back up drive for his home systems. Especially seeing it was an OEM drive and the return policies can be tricky at times.
So what did I learn from all of this. 1. The K8T800 chips set sucks for Windows XP 64bit and finding support on the VIA website is almost impossible. 2. SATA II drives don't always work with the SATA I controllers. 3. Never under estimate the time it will take to do a simple hard drive install. 4. Just because you have a 64 bit system doesn't mean the OS will work!!!!!!!!!! Makes sure to investigate before buying 64bit for compatibility. 5. SATA boot is not as strait forward as you may think sometimes is bass ackward.
Marns CDA By pr101j
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© 2004 Marns CDA
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