XP reinstall + SATA HDD = :(
Pardon this post - I've been hitting the aged rum for a bit tonight.
So around 9pm Tuesday night I decided to reinstall Windows XP. My current setup had been going for about 3 years (the age of my older child - funny that), and I had noticed some definite slowdown. Even the Mrs. had complained, so definite action had to be taken. I backed up vital things like baby pictures and Mozilla profiles on an external drive and threw in the XP install discs.
I remembered this procedure from 2004 or so: boot to CD, format C:, install Windows, blah blah. To make a long story shorter, my current HDD is SATA. This technology wasn't very popular (or even existing?) in 2002 when my WinXP disc was manufactured, so the install disc did not recognize the drive properly. I got messages of "this volume is damaged or missing" on several repeats. The official response on this from Microsoft seems to be "use a floppy disc to insert the drivers at the F6 prompt". WHO HAS A FLOPPY DRIVE ANYMORE?
Anyway, I downloaded what turned out to be an awesome program nLite to incorporate some drivers into the installation. Copied my install disc, inserted SP3 and the SATA drivers into the new ISO bootable. Everything seems to work great until the CD key prompt comes up:
INVALID CD KEY
Come to find out many varied attempts and 2 days later - with Vista machines and nLite there is an error when making slipstreamed discs including SP3...
OK... make yet another disc with SP2 instead. It finally works. Now I've spent several hours tonight digging up mainboard drivers, trying to download and extract AVG 8, and downloading and installing SP3. What a HUGE pain this whole thing has been. I'm still looking at an 800x600 resolution on a 20'' monitor.
What I'm wondering is this: how many people have the combination of Windows XP, SATA HDD, and no floppy drive?
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
Sorry to hear that you have so much trouble. I usually keep a slipstreamed version of any OS that I own.
I have not had a floppy drive in years now, I have a dedicated usb drive that is bootable and it is used for things like flashing BIOS and fixing problems on my system w/o loading up the OS.
From your description, I am betting your mobo is pretty old right? Be glad to know that newer mobos all have much better support for SATA drives, so you should not have such headache the next time you upgrade
Decisions are just decisions, there are neither "good" or "bad"
LobsterMobster wrote:
I just recently reinstalled on my SATA Raptor XP with SP3. With native ide mode turned on in the bios I didn't have any problems.
wordsmythe wrote:
I had a problem with my old VNF3-250 board when trying to install to a SATA drive with a IDE drive connected.
Turned out, it was a BIOS bug. I had to flash my BIOS to a more recent(but lower performing) BIOS, do the install, then reflash to the older(but better performing) BIOS.
You might go to pcper.com and check the forums - maybe other folks have had this issue with your hardware.
Sometimes these bugs can be really obscure, but there are official representatives on the pcperspective forums, so you might have luck there.
"And my son, too, thinks everything is a launchpad, every bug a meal, and every sunny day a reason to take all your clothes off and roll around in the grass." - rabbit
Actually, the exact opposite is true. The older SATA boards tended to have PATA chips on them to take care of legacy programs and OS's. What is happening lately is that the legacy stuff isn't being included anymore, so you need a specific driver so that the installer can see your disk. Welcome to what used to be "the world of SCSI".
USB floppies are inexpensive, and I once read (but never tried) that you could use a USB key to accomplish the same.
*Legion* recognizing greatness wrote:
Vista and Sver2008 will read from USB key for sure. XP (and older MS OS's) up to SP2 would not, it is hard coded to look at the A drive, if SP3 changed this, I don't know.
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
The article I read was how to do it in XP SP2. It was so simple, I didn't bother trying it...
I seem to remember it involved using a bootable USB key in a RAMDISK type scenario, and assigning the virtual drive A:.
*Legion* recognizing greatness wrote:
There are distributions of XP floating out there on the Interweb with integrated SP3 and specifically integrated SATA drivers.
This thread does not scale to my level.
An update:
I was able to install XP with SP2, then do the updates after everything was running. SP3 is installing now, and is taking what seems like a really long time. I suspect there may be some hardware problems with this machine because after the initial SP2 install everything was running fast and responsive. Then I downloaded and installed Firefox and AVG 8 and CCleaner. I was experiencing really terrible slowdowns before running the utilities. Firefox was taking 15-20 seconds to start with nothing else happening; Windows Update would hang up and/or crash IE.
Things have improved with each Windows Update round, though the machine is still not 100% up to speed for some reason. It's slightly slow on bootup and when opening any programs shortly after the desktop is fully loaded. I'll try to do a cleanup and defrag tonight and see if that helps. I would think that this machine would run Windows XP at absolute full speed; something just isn't right somewhere.
Specs on this box for those curious:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 (1.86ghz)
Gigabyte 965P-DS3/S3
Western Digital 250g Caviar blue SATA
2G RAM
GeForce 7900GS
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
Your symptoms sound like you need to install proper motherboard drivers from a corresponding disc that came with the machine. Video drivers can also cause slowdown.
This thread does not scale to my level.
Yep, I installed the motherboard drivers from the disc that ships with it, and also have the latest Nvidia driver. I could download some drivers from Gigabyte and see if that improve things.
We'll see how it goes tomorrow with more tweaking. Thanks for reading and for the suggestions.
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
Run memtest86+ (www.memtest.org) on your ram and test your hard drive with the manufacturers diagnostic tool.
wordsmythe wrote:
Per Gumbie's advice I've been doing a few hardware tests, and I think I've found the problem.
My hard drive results from HD Tune/ are as follows:
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS SATA 250gig
transfer rate minimum: 0.0MB/second
transfer rate maximum: 3.8MB/second
transfer rate average: 3.6MB/second
access time: 19.2 ms
burst rate: 3.8MB/second
CPU usage: 45.6%
compare this to my external drive's results:
Maxtor Onetouch II USB2.0 200g
transfer rate minimum: 25.9MB/sec
transfer rate maximum:27.5MB/sec
access time: 15.6ms
burst rate: 22.3MB/sec
CPU usage: 9.0%
Something is not right with this internal drive. My next steps are to double check motherboard drivers and physical connections? Maybe re-format and reinstall XP and hope for good luck?
Of course, it may be that this drive is about to die.
EDIT:
Well...it seems a cable was loose. I reconnected everything (which was what I should have done first anyway if I wasn't a dummy), and now I'm getting normal numbers and performance.
CASE CLOSED
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
Awesome
Glad it turned out to be something easy, instead of a dead hard drive.
wordsmythe wrote:
glad to hear it ended up well. I ran into this a few years back. I picked up a floppy-drive/flash card reader to solve it. You can usually find one for 10-20 bucks and even if the floppy only gets used to install XP on older mobos, the flash card reader comes in handy.
*Legion* wrote:
informationgames.info
To add insult to injury with this whole episode, I've spent 2 days now trying to patch a fresh installation of LOTRO. Both the game launcher and the standalone download (through a proprietary downloader), didn't work correctly until I reinstalled Microsoft's .NET and manually copied over some installation files.
All of this makes me want to fire up the Xbox 360, let me tell you!
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
I had this same problem when I upgraded to a SATA 3Gb/s 500GB drive a few months back.
My XP install disc was from 2001-- pre SP1+SP2. So I had to slipstream an XP install disc with sata drivers on it. Another way to go is to get a SP2 or later disc and install, sata drivers are built right in.
I've got your numbers, I got all your numbers!
Another, hopefully last follow up on this situation:
It turned out that my hard drive was indeed failing. The reseating of the cables was just a fluke fix - it slowed down again in a day or two.
I picked up a 320 gig Western Digital SATA 3Gb/s drive and threw it in today. The Western Digital drive copy software worked flawlessly creating the partitions, boot sector, and copying everything.
Running smooth now!
Osiran, lvl 50 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND