Total Confusion--Please help!

From: Lori A. Kuiper (loriak25_at_netnitco.net)
Date: 02/24/04

  • Next message: Paul: "Re: window xp" 
    Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 22:07:35 -0600

    I have a new system that I put together as follows: Motherboard is NF7-S
    V2.0; Processor is Althalon 1.8 2500+; Video card is Diamond Stealth S80
    Radeon 9200SE 128mb DDR DVI/TV-Out AGP 8X; Hard Drive is Western Digital
    120GB; DVD R,RW drive is I/O Magic Dual 4XMax.

    I have hard drive connected to Primary Controller set as Cable Select, DVD
    is on Secondary set as Master. Also have floppy drive installed.

    When I loaded XP Professional, and went to load the chipset drivers from the
    CD, it asked if I wanted to install the ATA Serial GUI (takes place of PCI
    Controller) and I said yes. It then recognized my hard drive as a SCSI
    device and my system ran really slow. My DVD driver however, ran fine. I
    then disabled the onboard ATA Serial Controller and Boot Rom in the Bios per
    someones advice. Installed a floppy drive, and Reloaded XP and downloaded
    the newest Nforce drivers from NVIDIA website. When asked if I wanted to
    enable ATA Serial GUI I answered no this time. Then loaded ATI
    videovdrivers from disk. My system is running faster and video seems to be
    working correctly now, but my DVD won't write to a blank DVD anymore. Also,
    the speed shown in system properties for the DVD drive is only 1/2 of what
    it was previously for the DVD Drive when I had the Serial ATA drivers
    loaded.

    Does this system require the ATA serial drivers loaded to recognize my hard
    drive and DVD Rom at Ultra ATA100 speed even though I do not have either
    connected to the ATA Serial controller? Should I re-enable the ATA
    Controller and just not select the Boot Rom portion and then reload the
    motherboard drivers with the ATA Serial GUI? I thought that the ATA Serial
    interface was only to enable RAID 0 and RAID 1? Since I only have the one
    hard drive and DVD Drive, I did not think the serial ATA drivers were even
    applicable although they are loaded if I switch the BIOS settings to
    defaults. It says in the motherboard manual that I should disable the
    onboard floppy controller if I install a high speed controller--does this
    mean that I need to disable the floppy if I install the ATA Serial drivers?

    Also, I cannot access the DVD drive before XP loads with my USB keyboard--is
    this normal? The keyboard is older, but it is suppose to run on USB.

    The next time I reload XP, should I shut down the system and boot directly
    from the DVD drive? I just put the CD in and then restarted the system the
    last time. I may have had a problem when I originally loaded XP since the
    BIOS needed to be updated to properly recognize my Western Digital
    drive--which I have done now. Also, I only formatted one partition when I
    loaded XP--should I format all of them and then just select which I want to
    put XP on? Now when I put a blank DVD in the drive and select properties,
    it shows the file system as RAW?

    Could the fact that I left the hard drive set to Cable Select (the way it
    was set from the manufacturer) and had the DVD drive set to Master cause
    problems--even though they were on separate cables?

    In summary, what drivers do I need to load, what should my boot sequence be
    when reloading XP, and do I need to shut down the PC before loading and boot
    directly to DVD drive? I will need to plug my keyboard into PS2 in order to
    do this. Can I change it back to PS2 later, or is it better to run it as
    PS2 since it seems to work OK that way. I currently have mouse on USB and
    that seems to be fine.

  • Next message: Paul: "Re: window xp"

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