Broke my PC :(

[Joe 90]

So, i bought the cheap £99 1tb spinpoint from ebuyer. and my PC now wont boot or install vista/xp

my system is:

AMD A64 3500
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (v1.0)
2x512 Kingston
2x512 Geil
Gigabyte Radeon HD 3850 Pro 512MB
120gb Maxtor ATA
250gb WD SATA
1tb Samsung Spinpoint F1

steps taken to install

First off, as with any install, i plugged in the hd and scewed it in, booted up and vista said 'new hardware found' ... 'installing' ... 'system needs to be restarted'
Fine - i restarted.
On the next boot it sat on the blank screen, before you get the vista icon in't middle of the screen. Left it for a while without any change. Rebooted a few times but to no avail.
Then i booted to my vista disk - ran a repair and rebooted. This time it flagged up an error with winlogon.exe
Rebooted again and this time got an i/o error when trying to get the vista disk to boot. (same winlogon.exe error when trying to boot the hdds)
Unplugged the tb hd and tried to boot. Again, i/o error.
Unplugged older hdds and tried to boot to the tb hd - i/o error.
So i next decided to boot my XP cd. It picked up my new tb hdd and i set it to format. Unfortunately this XP cd has no been binned because it failed to copy a load of files.
Rebooted and then XP threw up that usual hal.dll error
Ran XP setup again and it seemed to not be able to read my partitions table. My older hdds seemed to be read okay, but then it had empty disk entries and didn't read my tb hd. I repeated this a few times to no avail.
Then tried to boot my ubuntu live cd, which after configuring devices would reboot. Also tried my Knoppix live cd but this also failed.


:(

anyone got any ideas?
i'm tempted to just upgrade. was looking at going quadcore last week for under £300 :)

[Darrin]

Gigabyte mobo's have a high failure rate of the HDD controllers. Mine initially crapped the primary IDE, so I ran off the secondary for the longest time, then it failed too.

Might try another mobo if you have one handy.

[Joe 90]

unfortuantly my stash of spare hardware isn't what it used to be.

ah well, might just upgrade to the quad + Asus PK5 :/

[LeperousDust]

Yeah i have had the same problem with gigabyte boards and an ASRock board, that old computer is still going strong on its secondary though :)

[Joe 90]

right, so its dead. i'm over it, good ridence to the gb board.

new sys ordered.

[Davey_Pitch]

Sounds like you just wanted an excuse to order a new system :p

[Joe 90]

well yeah... but you know... it was forced ;D

glad to be able to say i'll be rid of that gigabyte by tomorrow :D

just hope the delivery comes the early side of 07:00 - 12:00 so i don't have to go to work and miss it!

just hope our internets back uptonight so i can get online my my PS3, or else it'll be a bluray night!

[Toby]

Out of interest, if you boot it in safe mode, does it stop on crcdisk.sys?

I had the same issue the other week - unplug all optical drives and USB devices and try it again. Worth a shot.

[Joe 90]

good question, i didn't note down what sys file it stopped on.

bit late now though. stripped my case down last night, got rid of all the dust and its sat waiting to have my new stuff installed!

*edit*
:eek: new stuff arrived and is waiting for me at home :eek: bring on 5.30!