Debugging Vista X64

[srp]

Hi all,

I am having trouble installing Vista on a machine I just purchased. I have the 64-bit OEM DVD.

The system configuration is the following:

Midi-tower case with 550W power supply (ATX2)
Abit AX78 motherboard (AMD 770 chipset)
AMD Sempron LE-1150 CPU
1024Mb RAM (Corsair "Value Select" DDR2 - 667MHz)
2x 250Gb SATAII Western Digital hard disks (SATA channel 1, 3) (WD2500AAJS)
Lite-On DVD/CD-ROM combo drive (PATA master)
Sony 52x CD-ROM drive (PATA slave)
Gigabyte GeForce 7200GS (256Mb DDR2 memory, 64bit)
Laser SB2.0 5-port PCI card
D-Link DE520CT network card (not a mistake - this is needed, for now)

The problem occurs after the first reboot during the Vista installation. The progress bar starts up and runs for sometime, then freezes and the system never boots up after that. I tried booting into safe mode which works but then gives me a message telling me that I can't install in safe mode. Using the option to display all device drivers as they are being loaded doesn't help me either--it appears to load all of them, then there's lots of disk activity before it stops.

Does anyone know what might be causing this problem, just from the info I've already given, or if not, any suggestions on how I might get some more info from Windows on what is stopping it? I realise I could go through the process of pulling all the add-on boards and other bits out of the case one by one, but surely there is some way of the OS being able to tell me where it's locking up without me having to do that. It would be an incompatibility with the OS anyway, not a fault of the underlying hardware, as I successfully installed Debian as a test, which worked without any real problems. I have also tried turning RAID mode on and off which doesn't seem to make a difference either. With RAID I used the motherboard driver CD which seemed to work initially, but then Vista install locked up at the same point again.

Any thoughts?


Thanks in advance for any help.

Simon.

 

[silver]

Not keen on your CPU, also up the ram.

 

[Jonno_G]

Not keen on your CPU, also up the ram.

That's a 2 GHz, 64-bit CPU. It might not be the worlds best CPU but it should suffice to run the installation, albeit a little slowly. From recent experience installing Vista Ultimate x64 from the OEM DVD, I would actually advise against adding more RAM until after the install is complete.

Your mobo has the AMD 770 chipset with an ATI SB600 southbridge, yes?

Do you have the option in your BIOS to choose between IDE, AHCI, and RAID for your 'Onchip SATA type' within your Storage Configuration page? (Note: Those names are what's used in an AMI BIOS, if you have a different brand of BIOS then it may call it something different.)

If your answer is 'Yes' to the above question then I may be able to help. I have recently had trouble installing Vista x64 on a system with the ATI SB600 Southbridge which incorporates the SATA controller. It turned out that the only way that I could get it to complete a stable install (i.e. one that would run for more than 24 hours after completion) was to flash the BIOS to the latest version and then ensure that the 'Onchip SATA type' was set to IDE. This allows the SB600 to see the SATA drives straight up, without having to load any drivers during the installation process. (Apparently you can change it to AHCI after you have windows up and running if you need to, however the board I used has two separate SATA controllers on it anyway, so I just attached my RAID to the other controller.)

If you try all of that and actually get your OS up and running then I recommend you install SP1 before any of the drivers, then install the SB600 driver next, then any other storage controller drivers, followed by your graphics drivers and then any other device drivers.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,...Jon.

BTW, it's probably a good idea to remove/detach any non critical hardware whilst running up the OS, and plug it back in after you've got Vista installed. I've heard suggestions that Vista doesn't like unnecessary complications during the install, and from what I've seen I'm inclined to believe them.

 

[srp]

Jon,

Thanks for the help. Yes, it's an AMD 770 chipset with SB600--and these were some of the BIOS settings I tried playing with, though as yet to no avail and I hadn't thought of reflashing the BIOS. I will check out ABIT's site and see if I can download a BIOS update, then turn RAID off, maybe remove the extra USB card (about the only part I can remove), and see if the install will work, then write back on here,

Regards,

Simon.

 

[Jonno_G]

The BIOS is at least worth a look. The board that I built on recently arrived with a BIOS that was at least three or four versions old.

 

[srp]

OK, tried the BIOS update - the version I installed was "M706A12.ZIP" from the ABIT site, which is BIOS version 1.2 for the ABIT AX78. Upgrade notes didn't mention anything about Vista support but I figured it was worth a go anyway. Then wiped the hard drive again, and tried to install Vista. Oddly, this time it rejected the product key--the same one I have used on the previous installation attempts with the same DVD. Otherwise, though, it acted identically and froze at exactly the same point as last time--just after the first reboot.

In the meantime, I tried installing XP Home Edition. This worked, and even seems to support RAID. No problems with the various other drivers either. I don't really want XP Home instead of Vista though--part of the point of upgrading the machine was to run a new OS, and I'm sure it's going to slow things down running an X86 OS on an X64 machine.

Any other ideas?

 

[srp]

Also tried using a different DVD drive, and removing the second hard drive and CD drive for the install. No go. Has anyone else had these problems before? This is starting to get very frustrating.

 

[Bubba]

This may be a stretch, but I had a similar problem and I upped the voltage to my RAM a tad at a time until it would boot. I lack the knowledge to know if this would be aplicable on your machine or even necessary with that amount of RAM. I also had to go into the BIOS and manually set the CAS timings.