Setup freezes

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I have put together a system on an Asrock K7S8X motherboard with Athlon 2400XP PCU, Hitachi 120GB HDD on IDE1, Lite-on CD-RW & Samsung DVD-ROM on IDE2 and a Hitachi 18GB SCSI HDD on Acard AEC6712UW UltraWide SCSI-3 PnP Controller. When I put in the XP installation disc and boot up, everything goes fine as far as:

‘Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration…’

At this point, it freezes up. Can anyone think of some vital thing that I may have omitted to do? The same thing happens with a Windows 2000 installation disc, and with either the CD- or DVD-ROM. Enabled boot devices are the two removable disc drives, IDE HDD and legacy SCSI device, with other bootable device enabled.

The controller card (device 7) is self terminating. As far as I can tell the SCSI HDD (device 0) is also self terminating and I had no trouble preformatting it in its current configuration, from the controller BIOS. There are no other SCSI devices.

I am told that the number of dots before freezing after the setup message were significant in NT, but don’t know if that applies for 2000 and XP. The message above is exactly as it appears on screen and is the same for both.

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Boy, I admit I don’t know the answer, Sparky, but the first thing I’d try is removing the SCSI card and trying again. Do you have any idea about the MS “certification” status of all the hardware?

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The two HDD’s, the controller card, the motherboard and Hercules Radeon 9000Pro All-in Wonder are all brand new. Everything else has been up and running with XP. The best advice I have had so far is to remove the other PCI cards (USB2, Firewire and Soundblaster Live! Platinum 5.1) and try and get the system going before adding them in again. I’d rather not change the slot (Slot 5 of 6), as this is the ideal place in terms of cable (68-pin to 80-pin HDD via SCA SCSI Cable Adapter) management and airflow, but maybe I’ll have to.

I also noticed that the ‘Press any key to boot from CD…’ message didn’t come up, as I am used to seeing; but maybe that is just a quirk of the Asrock BIOS.

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I’m with Al on this, but I’d go a step further – remove everything but the video adapter and a stick of RAM, and then see if setup continues. You might also want to ensure that you have the latest BIOS revision too. In either case, eliminate every variable possible in the hardware configuration and see if setup still balks or not.

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The one problem I am forseeing with going down this route is how XP will react when I start adding all these bits back in, if I do get it installed successfully (the machine’s at home, I’m at work). Can’t remember: does Win XP let you run it for a while before activating, or is that just Office XP?

Pity I can’t try these ideas now and get back to you. I don’t expect the Dell I am in the middle of rebuilding to be anything other than routine.

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Sparky,
You have 30 days before mandatory activation kicks in.

Bo

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The best ASRock forum I have found is at OCWorkbench. I have a K7VT2, and the K7S8X dominates the board. There’s a bunch of (over?)dedicated ASRock guys over there, and they have a K7S8XGuide, and the latest BIOS’es.
The two quick suggestions I have are 1) as was said previously, check for the latest BIOS. Especially with this board, which had MAJOR improvements from the first release of the BIOS when the board came out til now, and 2) you might try lowering your CAS latency settings for your memory. Sorry I didn’t pay attention to which and how much mem you are running, but setting the CAS at 2.5 instead of 2 can also make a big dif with the ASRock boards.

have fun,
good luck

kip

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Here’s a WAG.

Did you install the SCSI drivers for the SCSI drive when it asked if you want to install 3rd party SCSI drivers?

I don’t remember if it’s before or after that point, but that may be where it’s getting hung up.

Like I said, just a WAG.

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It doesn’t get that far. ‘Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration…’ appears, just the three dots and it hangs.

From the Hitachi website I found something that seems to suggest that the drive will only work with my card if I use a seperate SCSI terminator, which just leaves me with the question of what kind to use (active or passive)?

This is starting to drive me nuts. Since I started my new job, complete with ~2hr door to door commute, the only real time I have to work on the PC is the weekend – when I can’t buy anything I may find I need. This rebuild has now taken a month and it’s still not working!

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I’ll give that a try, before I buy anything else. Thanks.

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