PK5 : Cant install OS :Wont see Windows CD

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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Finally got my new ASUS P5K into my case and everything else connected up.

It POSTS fine but although I have the Windows disc in the DVDR drive, it doesnt appear to detect it and boot from it.

In the BIOS, I have it set to boot from CD first, although the BIOS detects the drive but not as a Pioneer 110, its detecting it as ATAPI CD?.

Am I just missing something obvious here?.

How do I get it to boot from the CD/DVD?. :confused:
 
Darn, meant P5K in thread title!!!. :p

I forgot to mention - The hard drive I am trying to install Windows onto is a 250Gb SATA and it has my old install of Windows on it from my previous system. I intended just sticking the vista disc in and formatting straight away for a fresh install.

Apart from not detecting the disc is in the drive, its going straight to the "Windows did not start normally" screen so its obviously "seeing" the old install.

The Pioneer DVD drive is a 110 PATA IDE drive, not an optical SATA.
 
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Had the exact same problem with a friends comp. As much as I tried I could not get the bugger to boot from CD. In the end I pulled the drive out and stuck it in my PC, run chkdsk and defragged it and all was fine afterwards
 
Yes, in the BIOS the first boot device is selected as "ATAPI CD", second boot device is the SATA HD.

There's no details as such, nothing specific like make etc in the BIOS to denote its a Pioneer DVDR drive, a 110. It is only about a year old, if that.

JMicron is enabled and controller mode is set to "IDE".

I've not touched anything else within the BIOS except for changing the boot order to boot from CD first.

*EDIT* Just tried a MinePE boot disc in there and it wont detect that either.

I'm sure its something simple that I'm missing!!!
 
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Havent got another CD option in there, just ATAPI CD, the hard drive and floppy drive options.

Does that mean its not seeing the optical drive, should it actually give it a label/name in the BIOS if it sees it properly, such as Pioneer DVDR110D which is how it showed up in my old systems BIOS?.
 
Just tried another DVDR drive, again, PATA IDE but a newer one, a Pioneer 112 which is only a few months old.

Still no joy and the BIOS still wont detect anything other than an "ATAPI CD" instead of actually naming the optical drive connected to the IDE channel on the board.

Could it be some sort of setting in the BIOS I'm missing?. Something along the lines of running a PATA IDE optical drive along with the SATA hard drive?.

Or could it be that the P5K doesnt like Pioneer optical drives?.:confused:

Very annoying, i was hoping to have this system up and running this evening.:(
 
Done a bit of Googling and found this:-

"Be sure to purchase an optical drive with a SATA interface instead of UltraATA, because the Intel chipset doesn’t support UltraATA anymore. Though most enthusiast motherboards offer an additional UltraATA controller to enable the user to connect legacy devices, you will want to disable all unused components."
Click to expand...

:confused:

I will grab a SATA optical drive tomorrow and at least that eliminates one possibility of the PATA Pioneer drive not being compatible.

It seems to be that way anyway, if the BIOS is showing it as an ATAPI CD then its not going to boot from a Vista DVD I would imagine?.

And I thought IDE was as IDE does!!!. Thought any recent IDE device would get recognised in the ASUS BIOS.

Missus now moaning even more since she just found the OcUK receipt from this mornings delivery of this kit and now I'm telling her I need a new SATA DVD drive....lol. :p

*EDIT* Realist, I have tried the jumper in Master, CS and slave modes, still no joy.
 
Well, I think I'm getting somewhere. :D

How strange is this though?.

Via Google, I found a post on some obscure US forum where the bloke said he had removed the USB and Firewire cables from his case that were connected to their respective headers on the P5K, same as mine were.

He said that cured the problem and as soon as he restarted his PC and went into the BIOS, JMicron detected his Pioneer optical drive on the IDE channel.

So I thought "What the hell..." and tried it and lo and behold, it worked!!!. :D

Now in the process of installing Vista.

/looks at clock

Think its gonna be a late night for me......:rolleyes: :p
 
Draeger said:
How strange is this though?
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Nice One! :)

Sorry I couldn't be more help, my P5K-E WIFI system is in 30 pieces atm. I think I did hear about this problem once before though?

Sounds like you figured out a workaround to get you going but I'm not sure what the actual fix is?

Is there anything non standard about your case USB/Firewire headers? Are the the wires mounted in a block or are they seperate pins?
 
Dont think there's anything different or non standard about the case, no.

It's a Chieftec Black Dragon.

The wires for the front USB & firewire come off the case inputs and terminate in blocks rather than individual wires, yes.
 
Well, hit another brick wall. :confused:

Vista install appeared to be going ok, although it was taking a bit longer than I thought it should have done.

It looked like it was stuck at "Completing Installation" and the progress bar had not moved for some time. So I decided to call it a night last night and go to bed but thought I would just leave the thing to continue and check it in the morning.

Woke this morning to find it on the black screen with the green bar going from left to right. It sat like that for 40 minutes and by that time I had to leave for work.

Will try a fresh install tonight when I get home and this time I'm going to format the hard drive properly via a boot disk with Partition Magic 8 on it. Incidentaly, when I chose to "format" the 250Gb SATA hard drive last night at the start of the installation, it took literaly seconds to do so, which to me, didn't look right at all. :confused:

Any ideas why the install of Vista appears to be freezing?.

Nipping out later to get a SATA DVDR drive, but I dont think thats the issue stopping Vista installing as the Pioneer PATA one seems to be working ok now that I've done as I mentioned previously re: the USB and Firewire cables.

Is there somewhere in the BIOS where I can disable PATA altogether if I just hook up a SATA optical drive or would that be pointless and am I barking up the wrong tree?.
 
Draeger said:
Is there somewhere in the BIOS where I can disable PATA altogether if I just hook up a SATA optical drive
Click to expand...
You can disable the JMicron controller in BIOS if you don't need to support legacy IDE.

Draeger said:
am I barking up the wrong tree?.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what on earth is happening there but in simplest terms you have either got some faulty hardware *or* you are doing something wrong. Have you had a quick read of the motherboard manual and is most of the kit you are using known good and working from a previous build?

Just wanted to confirm this is the mobo you are using?

ASUS P5K *Vanilla*
 
Yes m8, that's the P5K I have.

Kit installed along with it was all from my previous build which worked perfectly.

CPU is a C2D E6300, HD is a Maxtor 250Gb SATA which is about 3 months old. PSU is a Coolermaster 520W modular, brand new from OcUK along with the mobo.

Memory is the 2x 1Gb Geil DDR2 Ultra low latency stuff I linked to in my previous thread about choosing a mobo.

GPU is an Connect 3D ATI X1900XT 512Mb PCI-E.

The Pioneer DVDR 110D drive was also out of the previous build, and then as I said earlier I tried a brand new Pioneer DVDR 112 last night.

Once I had removed the USB and Firewire cables though, the older Pioneer drive appeared to be found and working. It was this drive that I was attempting to install Vista with last night.

The hard drive had my previous Windows Installation of XP on it and as I said I attempted to format it during the Vista install and do a fresh install but the format only appeared to take seconds which was a bit strange for a 250Gb drive.

I've now got a brand new SATA ASUS 2014 DVDR drive here which I will fit when I get home.

I would assume disabling the JMicron controller wont cause any problems now that I dont really have anything that will be connected to the IDE slot on the mobo?.

I'm hoping I get home, stick the ASUS DVDR in, hook it up to the second SATA port ( red one, right? ) , format with PT8 and then install Vista and bobs your mothers brother!!!.

But you know what PC's are like, won't be as simple as that!!!.
 
It could be you have more than one issue going on? you found a *workaround* for the optical drive not appearing but I'm not sure why your installation hung afterwards?

There are two ways of formatting a hard drive the normal full format and the quick format. I never really understood what the quick format was for until RPStewart from the hard disk forum pointed out he uses it all the time with no problem, sounds like you did the quick format. The general info I picked up about the differences between these two disk format options was the slow method is probably better to use when the disk is brand new and is being formatted for the first time (its checks every bit of the disk for errors therefore is slow). The quick format is given the nod for when you reformat a drive that has already been full formatted.

Anyway . . .

Sounds like you have the mobo on full auto mode and I am wondering if your system is stable? Maybe worth running Memtest from an optical drive, I recommend the Ultimate Boot CD as its got heaps of useful stuff all accessed from a simple menu.

I am thinking your 2x 1Gb Geil DDR2 Ultra low latency memory isn't set-up correctly?
 
Cheers for the replies m8, appreciate it.

I'll try Memtest from a boot disc once I get home shortly.

As far as the Geil RAM goes, when you say it isn't set up correctly could you expand a little on that?. I didn't touch anything in the BIOS relating to RAM, just installed each stick in the yellow slots on the mobo and that was it.
 
Draeger said:
when you say it isn't set up correctly could you expand a little on that?. I didn't touch anything in the BIOS relating to RAM, just installed each stick in the yellow slots on the mobo and that was it.
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Well in an ideal world you could plug everything together and it would just work, sadly this is not always the case. Sometimes memory doesn't play nicely on a certain motherboard due to incorrect SPD value or the motherboard not interpreting those values correctly. Did the memory work fine in *auto* mode on your last motherboard?

You may need to enter BIOS and manually assign the MHz, vDimm and timings yourself, it may be as simple as increasing the vDimm.

I'm not 100% this is whats causing your problems but from what you told me its the most obvious place to start?

I always run Memtest from an Optical drive before I install my O/S just to get a quick idea that its all good, give that UBD a spin and let us know. . .
 
Draeger said:
Well, I think I'm getting somewhere. :D

How strange is this though?.

Via Google, I found a post on some obscure US forum where the bloke said he had removed the USB and Firewire cables from his case that were connected to their respective headers on the P5K, same as mine were.

He said that cured the problem and as soon as he restarted his PC and went into the BIOS, JMicron detected his Pioneer optical drive on the IDE channel.

So I thought "What the hell..." and tried it and lo and behold, it worked!!!. :D

Now in the process of installing Vista.

/looks at clock

Think its gonna be a late night for me......:rolleyes: :p
Click to expand...

Awesome stuff, my mate had exactly the same problem a few months back.. we couldn't figure out what on earth was going on, so he purchased a sata optical drive... good one to know for the future though!
 
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