Abit N7F2 - problems with IDE drives

[AxemanFU]

I've had my old Abit N7F2 with Barton 2500+ o/c rig on the shelf for a while, and decided to use it to build a new PC for the wife. I installed it with a 340 watt PS that I know is good, and with some good corsiar dual channel matched ram, a cheap 6200LE video card, etc, and I've been trying to use IDE drives that were just working in my old Linux box in this machine, and install XP. No matter what IDE channel I put the drive on, or if I use one or both of the drives, I am having problems booting and installing from the winXP CD. If I put in a 120gig WD, it never gets past the initial scanning hardware setup of the install process. I put in a 60 gig hitachi, and it allowed me ONCE to entirely install winXP, patch, etc, then crapped out and is now unbootable, but appears to be working physically (might be overheating or something, or not cooperating with the N7F's IDE). I even tried putting the drives in a USB drive enclosure and booting or using them over USB to re-install and no dice.

I have a 200gig WD SATA drive I can use, but the Sata on an N7F2 is an SI addon chip and not in the Southbridge, so the winXP installer doesn't recognize it and see the drive on it, so I can't use that drive for the install. For some odd reason it DOES see the USB multireader I have. I wonder if I can install windows on a big compactflash and then image it over to a HDD... .

Here's what I'm really hoping I can do: Image the drive I was able to install onto before it crapped out IF it will run in the USB enclosure long enough, and using my PC to image that install onto the SATA drive, and then install the imaged SATA drive into the PC. Not sure if that will work either though. Maybe I should pop the drives into the usb enclosure and try them on my PC to make sure they are really working properly stlll. I can't believe I'm having so much trouble with this board and these old drives after they ran great in my system for 2+ years.

Any headache saving advice anyone can give me on this?

 

[AxemanFU]

I've heard that the PS might also be a problem but that is very hard to test for. This PS I am using now had previously run this mobo/processor and a more powerful video card and additional drives for a couple of years, and ran a 2400+ linux system also. I'm pretty sure it has enough power to all the leads. The voltages the mobo is getting in bios seem adequate.

 

[AxemanFU]

No ideas huh?

No problem, I figured it out. I took the intital IDE PATA drive I had the windows install on, put it on as a lone drive as master, and after a couple of reboots and a very long wait to detect, it decided to magically and mysteriously boot into safe mode without crashing. I think the WD drive might have been screwing it up when attached, causing some sort of conflict, and it was also taking the new windows install a long time to detect the new drives after the configurations were changed when I was swapping drives out while working the problem.

Then I really wanted to get off of the IDE alltogether, so I enabled the SATA chip in the bios and installed the sata drivers in windows on the old PATA drive, then used adonis drivimage (poor man's Ghost, but it works very well) to get the PATA IDE drive imaged onto the SATA drive. With the SATA enabled and the drivers for it in the image, I was then able to remove the old PATA drive and boot straight from the new SATA drive using the image. I also now have a backup clean fresh install on the old PATA drive in case my wife or I manages to nuke the current install...

Hopefully this is helpful to someone trying to roll from PATA to SATA where the SATA support isn't native to the windows installer and no driver support is available to f6 to in the install process.