Built new comp, vista not completing install

[Alidra]

Built a new comp last night

amd athlon 64 x2 6000+
Geforce 8800+ GT
Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - AMD Motherboards (mobo)
some no name dvd drive (sata)
hard drives from my old comp.

All went well until i tried to install vista. On first start up the comp couldnt find my dvd drive. Then after a few restarts it magicly found it. So Vista boots from disk, does all it should, then says to complete it needs to restart. there is only one restart in this whole precess. The drive im installing to have been formated, so its clean. So it restarts and pops up the screen to start the vista install all over again. Its not telling me to remove the disk while it does this, removed the disk when it restarted and all it said was boot error insert disk and press enter, or something to that effect. Now im noticeing after the many times its done this it takes a retarded amount of time to boot up and list my hard drives. What am i doing wrong here?

hope i made some since. Any advice would be great.

 

[johngalt]

Hi, Alidra, and welcome to the forums.

Have you checked your BIOS to make sure that the drives are being reported correctly? If the HDs are IDE then you might have forgotten to make one a slave....

Without knowing the type of HDs you have we cannot really go forward....other than suggesting that you use another computer to download tools to check the HDs....

 

[Fumz]

The first thing I'd do is double check all you connections to make sure everything is plugged in correctly and securely.

While Gigabyte has come on strong with their recent Intel chipset boards, they've always been a bit sloppy when it came to nVidia chipsets. If it were me, I'd flash to the latest bios before making another move: GIGABYTE - Support - Motherboard - BIOS - GA-MA78GM-S2H (rev.1.0)

The second thing I'd do, whether you flash to a newer bios or not, would be to go into the bios and check things out. First load the optimized defaults, then check to see that your hard and optical drives are being correctly reported. I would also disable the onboard video since you have an 8800; that may or may not be causing an issue, but at least for right now, remove it as a possible suspect. Assuming the hardware is fine, if things aren't being reported correctly, then you should flash to the most recent bios and repeat the process.

Onto the install:

Its not telling me to remove the disk while it does this, removed the disk when it restarted and all it said was boot error insert disk and press enter, or something to that effect.

If I understand you right, you pulled the disk out in the middle of the install? Don't. Remove the disk only when you're sure the installation is complete; if you're looking at the Vista desktop, then you can remove the dvd.

While I can't recall all the steps that take place, what I do recall is the amount of time it takes to install Vista. Just when I thought it was done, there's another step. That first step, the initial loading is short, it's what happens after the reboot that can take more time, relatively speaking. I recall seeing a message that said something to the effect of, "this could take an hour", but that was a gross exaggeration.

Now im noticeing after the many times its done this it takes a retarded amount of time to boot up and list my hard drives. What am i doing wrong here?

Many times attempting to install Vista or many times booting up not having your devices recognized?

One thing I'd add, which is most likely completely irrelevant to your issue, but still very important: you're really going to have to take care to manage heat. Everything about your board just screams "hot". You have integrated video in a northbridge which has one of the smallest heatsinks I've seen in a long time. Actively cooling it is something you should definitely consider, especially if you plan on using the integrated video. The 88's throw out their fair share of heat too, so when you combine all this inside a micro ATX case, things could awfully hot awfully fast.

 

[AvatarOfTheShip]

Funz is right - the Ultimate, Absolute and Primary Axiom of PCs is Check The Physicals

 

[Alidra]

]

If I understand you right, you pulled the disk out in the middle of the install? Don't.

If by in the middle u mean not finished then ya, but i ment when it was restarting which i now know that means its not done.

Have you checked your BIOS to make sure that the drives are being reported correctly? If the HDs are IDE then you might have forgotten to make one a slave....

i ended up swiching the plugs and now the comp boots much faster so its happy there.

New development though. So im installing windows vista on my hard drive. It looks like its going well, it does the first restart, pops up and says vista is starting for the first time and i see the completeing install, goes for a bit and them it freezes. I left it like that for prob two hours, cant move the mouse, nothing. i know i have enough space and i formated the drive just so it would be a clean install. Its not a SATA drive and its a partition of a bigger drive thats been split previously. I even tryed installing to the drive without my other hard drive pluged in and it still freezes when completing.

 

[Day24]

I had some problems myself trying to install vista in a mixed environment..... what do I mean by this? I mean having IDE hard drives with a SATA DVD drive.

If at all possible, get yourself a SATA hard drive. Not only will it be faster, you will also rule out hard drive failure (which is one of the other options). [edit 2: I had some problems trying to install vista while having the IDE drives installed as well as the SATA drives. I solved this by installing with only the SATA drive installed, and simply plugging in the IDE drives after the install was completed)

The last option is hardware related. It does sound like vista is hanging during the determination of what drivers it should install. Have you checked to see whether all the correct connectors and cables have been attached at the correct places? What can also help (strangely enough) is unplugging things and simply blowing the dust out with a can of air. (I mean everything, including IDE cables and RAM)

What has also helped me in the past has been changing and or checking whether I was using the correct IDE connector on the board.

Also, before I end my rant, if you are using your old IDE drives, then maybe you are also using your old IDE cables.... Try some new ones.... Oh, and re-check the jumper settings on the drives (slaves/masters, etc)

 

[Alidra]

So it has to be the drives i am useing. Vista just doesnt like vista and the reason i know this is cause im on my new comp with vista running lol. So sounds like its SATA drives for me. Thanks for the help