Maxtor hardrive wont load the OS

[renegadeandy]

Hi, i recently bought a Maxtor 120gb 6Y120LO harddrive new. My current rig is athlon 3200 with 768 megs of ddr 400 ram its a completely new system and is yet to load an os. At first i couldnt get the OS to instal, it kepy giving me blue error screens, so i simply installed Xp on my other pc, it installed fine. However, now when i try to boot from this harddrive, Xp shows its loading screen for about 1/45 of a second, nefore giving me a blue error screen saying the following :

STOP:0X0000007B (0XF795C640, 0XC0000034, 0X00000000, 0X00000000

This is very anoying and i cannot see why its doing it. The drive loads perfectly on my other pcs, and no matter what drive i am using in thias new pc, it wont load the OS. The motherboard is the GA-7N400-L1 also brand new, as is the ram, the hard drive also.

Please help me out, im confused and anoyed. Thanks very much

Andy Armstrong

[cpugeniusmv]

could you post more information from the blue screen?

try testing your memory with a bootable CD such as memtest86

http://www.memtest86.com/

[renegadeandy]

HI, i have tested the ram in my other pc, and it loads windows no problem which is why im quite confused. I tried loading a win95 hard disk this morning and that worked, which makes me think it may be to do with ntfs partition?

[renegadeandy]

sorry that was most retarded of me i posted that last post like 4 times wtfs up with that! Anyhow, any ideas?

[igalan]

Triple post fixed .

Now, the problem seems memory related. It's not necesarily bad, maybe not compatible. Unfortunately it's a too common issue on nForce chipsets . I would use more relaxed timings (like 3-3-3) to see what happens, or try with another brand if possible.

[renegadeandy]

Well i have tried putting in a stick of 256 ddr 2700, but i get the exact same error, im confident its not a memory problem, but thats just my opinion, the 7B bit of the error message mentioned above makes me think its a harddrive controller, or harddrive communication error.

Thanks for replying, but i have tested the ram

[igalan]

Still the problem can be the memory, as I said, not because it is bad, but because it's not compatible. With my Asus A7N8X Deluxe I tried several sticks of Kingston, and none worked, I couldn't install Windows XP or 2000. Now I use those sticks on other computers with no problems. I got two cheapo chinon sticks, and problem went away. Same for every computer that I built using nForce 2, I use OEM memory most of the time (although Infineon and Corsair seem to work well).

If that's not the problem, than the next suspect is the harddrive itself. If you have a spare drive, even small (3 GB), try to install XP with the same configuration using this drive.

[renegadeandy]

I think its the harddrive, but im not sure, im going to try a windows 98 install soon, i again doubt its the ram if it loads windows 95 - and the error occurs at exactrly the same point, which makes it odd, as ram is random access memory, which means it doesnt fill the ram in a specific order

[deel1981]

I had just the same problem a week ago :-)

1. - If you use a SATA hard drive so when you install win XP or win2000 you have to load a speciall driver because SATA infact is a SCSI device and uhen you start th e setup program you have to pres F6 and load a driver from the floppy. That driver is given in the setup CD o fthe motherboard.

2. - You cant boot Nforce mother board with winXP installed on some other Chipsett for example Via KT400!

[renegadeandy]

Ok i agree with not being able to bootxp from another chipset that it was originally instaleld by, it was a last attempt - problem was that it doesnt load xp when installing it , and its really beginning to piss me off! can somebody out there help me

[renegadeandy]

OH yeehaa, i updated the bios, and it loads xp, except i had a fat32 partition and it freezes on load, cuold this stop it from loading, the fact its on a fat32 partition?

[igalan]

I don't think that using a fat32 partition could be the problem, I've been using fat32 for many computers, and no problem. Did you try with another stick of ram? Did you try to run memtest86? Did you try to use another hdd to install XP? Have you tried using slower memory clock or slower timings? Are you using APIC (this is set up in the bios)? Did you try removing all hardware during install except video, cd/dvd and hdd?

[igalan]

Here's another program that can help you to find out where the problem is: http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

[renegadeandy]

Turned out, it needed several bios updates as it was not compatible with my Kingston ram :'(

[igalan]

So, have you managed to get this Kingston stick working with a new BIOS?