Help rebuild failed

[Baablefish]

Hi hope you can help.
I've done some minor upgrades before but have just carried out a complete rebuild as follows and now cant get system to operate hence have had to retro build to old spec to get stystem working -
Have rebuilt using following -
Gigabyte GA P31 DS3L PCI express MB
Intel Core 2 duo E2200 LGA775 Conroe cpu
W Digital caviar SE16 320 Gb Sata II hd
2 X 1gb pc2 6400c4 DUAL CHANNELL ddr2
Arctic 7 pro cpu cooler
Corsair VX450 PSU
GEForce 8600 GT OC graphics card

A couple of problems occur on start up -
1. minor problem - No BIOS beep although can get into BIOS settings and adjust
2. MAJOR problem when reinstalling Win XP system justs gets into a loop constantly asking me to install win xp. Every time I do this the system then restarts and asks me to reinstall again.....

Also is there any way to link my old SATA HD into this system which is SATA II?

 

[JonBev33]

Hi,

I had a similar problem, did an upgrade and the system would keep rebooting after spash screen but I could bet into BIOS.

The problem was Ram voltage - BIOS made a guess at 1.8v so i bumped it up to 2.1 and all is fine.

Oh, ans SATA drives will work fine on a SATA II board.

 

[closeratio]

2. MAJOR problem when reinstalling Win XP system justs gets into a loop constantly asking me to install win xp. Every time I do this the system then restarts and asks me to reinstall again.....

Have you changed the boot priority after you restarted it the first time (when Windows installed the first lot of files) so that it boots from the hard drive you're installing Windows on, rather than the DVD drive? You'll be able to change the boot priority in the BIOS somewhere.

If you leave it on the DVD drive as the first priority it will, like you say, just keep going back to that because the CD's still in the drive.

 

[Baablefish]

Thanks will go for another rebuild tonight and try voltage etc although dont understand why this should be the problem.
Have reset boot priority to HD then CD but when this is done it checks HD then cd and says disk error unable to read disk (because its not there!) so seems like HD problem?

 

[closeratio]

Thanks will go for another rebuild tonight and try voltage etc although dont understand why this should be the problem.
Have reset boot priority to HD then CD but when this is done it checks HD then cd and says disk error unable to read disk (because its not there!) so seems like HD problem?

Sorry I might not have explained it very well, my fault. The first time you turn your rig on (with nothing on the drive at all, no windows or anything), you want to set the boot priority so that it looks for the CD drive first.

Then once it's put the first set of files on your hard drive (with the not so pretty DOS-like interface it uses) and it's told you you need to restart your computer, do that, but change the boot priority in the BIOS to the hard drive as it starts up again. Now when it starts again it should boot form the hard drive (with the initial set of Windows files on it), and it'll take the rest of the data from the CD and do the rest of the installing.

Basically only boot from the CD for the first set of windows files, and then change it to the hard drive and leave it like that til the end of time

If after this you still get that error (and you're sure it's installed the first set of windows files on your hard drive), then yes, you may have a problem with the hard drive.

Although to be honest that shouldn't be the case because if there was something wrong with your hard drive you wouldn't have been able to install anything on it in the first place