My first time! i'm scared. tell me what you think... - Page 3 - New-System-Build

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don't worry kasceis, i run into some of the strangest things with computers. i had a dell 5150 that had some crazy problem that turned into a recall but gave me a huge headache forever. things like this happens to me all the time, and it sucks haha. i'm sure yours will go fine.

i'm gonna go back to it tomorrow, i'm going to relax the rest of the night and watch some basketball i'll let ya know tho

Reply to jtballer

Register or log in to remove.

apparently when I formatted the drive it changed something and now when i try to install windows 7 I can't even get to the point where it asks where to install.

now i get this message:

Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code:0xE0000100

gah. well, i might just end up taking this to a place for some professional to look at it. i'm just about fed up at this point

Reply to jtballer

A quick google of the error code makes it look like Windows is not recognizing the partition. The format errored out in Windows XP, so perhaps the drive is not properly formatted.

You tried swapping sata data cables and checked the power connections?

Also, you tried formatting with NTFS, correct?

I'd start a new thread with a title explicitly stating your problem, others will be more likely to chime in then.

I did a search on newegg for people who have the same motherboard, the GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R 1366 X58, correct?

And found a user with a similar experience,

" Rating + 1 DOA 1

Pros: It’s a sturdy board, and has above-average layout except for the awkward-angled SATA ports.
Newegg provides a good RMA delivery service. thank you Newegg.

Cons: Would not recognize hard drive could not load OS. Thought it was my new hard drive so I installed it in another machine and the hard drive worked fine. The hard drive was detected in the BIOS. Not sure what the problem was."

This could very well be your problem, but I'm also worried since XP did a bad format, you ran XP on your new setup?

I would most likely look into a bios flash.

wow!

that sounds exactly what is going on with mine... so your saying it is the motherboard?

so you think the flash bios will fix it and i won't have to send it back like this guy did?

if it IS the motherboard, maybe that would explain why it takes forever on the setup screen just to get to the hard drive part?

and yes i tried changing around the cables.

what do you think about the xp format? i think before anything i should check the hard drive, what do you think? i don't another computer to check it on though...

Reply to jtballer

wow, a lot of bad reviews for that motherboard.

honestly i kind of hope that isn't what's wrong. then i'm going to have to take off that damn huge cooler for the cpu haha.

Reply to jtballer

It could be the motherboard, I won't rule anything out until we know for certain. Personally I think a bios flash may contain a fix to this issue. And if it is the motherboard it could explain it, is it very slow to post?

I am worried that the xp format errored out. Perhaps you could acquire a friends computer to test it? I'd definitely check the drive, and maybe if you get your hands on a spare hard drive plug that in just to see if the computer will recognize a known working drive.

Removing CPU cooler's is a pain, I'll probably cry when I need to take off the Mega Shadow, that thing has the most over engineered retention mount ever.

Message edited by ominous prime on 11-06-2009 at 07:16:00 PM

Newegg reviews are always suspect, but this one seems very similar to your issue, although it may not require a RMA, just a bit of cunning to get a workaround.

haha cpu coolers aren't fun.

um, well, there's another desktop here but it uses a different connection... IDE or ATA i guess. i don't know if there's any way to test it with that?

if not, i will have to wait till monday to test on another computer.

far as post, ummm... the gigabyte screen comes up right away and when i hit the post button it goes to the post pretty fast.

well, i'm going to look into bios flash and see how to do it exactly in the meantime i guess. i started reading about it on the gigabyte site and it said it can possibly damage something so i got a lil worried haha.

Reply to jtballer

oh and also, yes i formatted with NTFS, didn't see you ask that earlier.

and yeah making a new post might be a good idea. might have to do that in a bit.

Reply to jtballer

i did call the local computer place this morning. they told me it would be 32 dollars to diagnose the problem, then if they fix it theirself it would start at 100 dollars.

i thought about for a while seriously but ended up being too lazy to go haha. and i think i should try to test the drive before i take it there for them to take my money anyway. and once they diagnose it i should be able to fix it myself. i just need to figure out what's wrong.

Reply to jtballer

Old computer I take it? No sata ports? Don't think it will be possible without a conversion cable.

The board does have IDE does it not? Perhaps you could try connecting the hard drive from that computer and seeing if Windows will recognize it. (of course don't install to the drive, but just seeing if it would recognize it could be helpful)

A bios flash gone awry will most likely render your motherboard useless. I've only ever done it through Windows, I know the better way to do it is through a bootable usb flash drive, but I don't have the expertise to advise you on that.

I think you would be best served by creating a new thread, then link to that thread from here.

i'm going to try the old hard drive in the computer i've built and see if it sees it in windows 7.

it's weird that windows 7 won't show it but it showed up in xp. ya know?

anyway, i hope one day i will fix this and i will make a thread just for you thanking you and letting everyone on this board know that we did it!

Reply to jtballer

It is weird that xp could see it, but I find it strange that it failed during the format.

I'm know you'll get it to work, one way or another. But I still think starting a new thread with a title more explicit to the problem you're facing now would be beneficial. There are a lot of geeks here that are willing to help and know a great deal more than I do.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OMINOUS PRIME!

i took this 10 GB hard drive that i had from YEARS ago and tried it and windows 7 showed it in the list!

So i am installing windows 7 on it for the heck of it... I don't know if it's even big enough haha. It said it required like 21 gb, but whatever, it's installing right now.

So that was it? I need to RMA the hard drive? I'm going on newegg now to do that!

WOOO! maybe i shouldn't get too excited but this is great

Reply to jtballer

i've had this hard drive for probably 10 years at least, and it was the hard drive in my original computer, my first computer ever.

since then, i've had two laptops both of which i've had to send in multiple times and have the hard drives replaced. i also had a WD external hard drive that failed just a few months ago and was only about 2 years old.

do they just make hard drives poorly these days or what? this thing is 10 years old and still going (crossing fingers)

Reply to jtballer

Sorry man, was at Disney for the day. I think it could very well be the hard drive, everyone gets a lemon now and again, shipping is the usual suspect on hard drives, however I would still test it when you get your hands on another computer before putting forth a RMA.

Another thought I have, and this is probably less appealing is that the motherboard isn't playing nice with a drive as large or larger than a terabyte.

Do you have windows 7 up and running on that 10gig drive?

If so, could you put in the 1tb WD and format it through Windows? And perhaps run WD diagnostic tool to check it.

hey that's probably a good idea about testing it now with windows 7. i should probably do that. i already put in the RMA. i mean... it's not a big deal is it? it's just like a return, right and they are going to send me another one.

But anyway I see what you're sayin, just make sure it is the hard drive and not my motherboard messing up. I will try that out, thanks man.

Reply to jtballer

A RMA isn't a big deal, just a standard return, but they won't ship a new one out until they receive the old one, so it could take a bit. Although I did have a bad experience with RMAing a netbook, that was a nightmare, ended up with a refund rather than a replacement in the end but usually they go very smoothly.

Have you checked your bios version? And have you checked the latest update on Gigabyte's website? A bios update may also correct the problem of recognizing 1tb+ drives, if the motherboard is the culprit.

Personally, I would put in the 1tb drive, locate it and attempt a format in NTFS. If it fails, and it probably will given the track record. Download and run Western Digital Diagnostics which should tell you whether or not the drive is a lemon.

If WD Diagnostics tells you it's fine, then I suspect we may have a motherboard issue. In which case I would attempt a BIOS flash to the latest version and hope that would solve the issue.

May want to contact support before flashing though. Because if something would go awry, some companies might tell you it's not their problem if a board gets bricked b/c of a bad flash.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

hmmm so i ran the WD lifeguard diagnostic tool, and it checked the hard drive and it said it was working fine.

weird.

Reply to jtballer

Were you able to format it as well?

yes....

Reply to jtballer

So you're able to use it as a storage drive currently?

*I see that was the wrong board, oops*

Regardless, what version of bios do you have? And it looks like there are two revisions of the board.

None of the bios updates says anything about playing nice with 1tb+ drives, however.

This is the Gigabyte page to download the latest bios. Although I'm not certain as to whether you are comfortable flashing.

http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Mot [...] uctID=2991

Message edited by ominous prime on 11-08-2009 at 05:51:26 PM

wrong board? hmm?

to be honest, i'm not sure at this point what version the bios is... i will have to check in a few minutes.

but... is this gonna be hard? do i download it to a flash drive and then upload it during startup in the bios or something?

Reply to jtballer

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support [...] hBIOS.aspx

well, i'll use that link if/when i do this.

Reply to jtballer

Well there's two different revisions, 1.0 and 1.6 it has different bios updates for both boards. You can tell which board and bios version in the bios itself.

It isn't really that difficult, but it can brick the board if done improperly.

You'd need to create a bootloader I believe so the bios update can be installed via a flash drive.

I don't have the expertise to help you with that, I do bios updates through Windows, which can also be dangerous if a program interrupts the flash. I did it on my MSI board and it went flawlessly, Gigabyte has a similar update through windows.

*by wrong board I had found an oddity with a Gigabyte board recognizing a 1.5tb drive as a 500gb, but it wasn't the same board as yours, I didn't notice until afterward and I edited it out"

Message edited by ominous prime on 11-08-2009 at 06:21:46 PM

Although a flash may not correct the problem, seeing on how it isn't mentioned. Have you attempted to see if Windows 7 will now recognize the 1tb drive to install on now that it has been properly formatted?

yep, i tried it again and it gave me the error message from before

but when i was in windows 7 i was able to use the drive. like i could save things to it.

so i don't know. if the drive is fine, i guess it has to be motherboard that is causing it right?

i'll have to look into flash bios...

Reply to jtballer

It looks like the motherboard is the cause Jtballer.

The same error as before as in it doesn't see the drive?

It's not playing nice with 1tb+ drives as the boot drive. Another thought I had, are you planning on partitioning the drive? Perhaps you could partition it in Windows then try again, it may work it may not. Might be worth a try if you're uncomfortable flashing.

If you're going to flash through Windows, make sure you disable all background programs, antivirus, etc. If something interrupts the flash it could brick it and if you're power goes out, your goose is cooked.

well it's saying to try again when i get the resources or whatever and with the error code as i posted before.

this sucksssssssssssssss. but anyway, thanks again for your help ominous prime, you are a gentleman and a scholar

Reply to jtballer

lol I'm not so sure on either of those accounts Jtballer. But thanks, I'm glad I could help, marginally. We'll get this fixed yet.

I wouldn't be too afraid of flashing through Windows, and partitioning the drive might be worth a try as well.

Just be sure if you flash to check the revision number of the motherboard, as well as the bios version. If it's the latest version there's no need to flash, of course.

Just kind of following along here a little. To jtballer, if your motherboard has an option to save a copy of your current bios to a flash drive or something to that effect, definitely do that. I've got a Gigabyte board that had a bios recovery utility with it, and I backed up my original bios before flashing with an updated one from Gigabyte's own site for my board mind you.

So glad that I did, because when I did the flash, it worked, but I began getting data corruption on my hard drive. I ended up having to flash back to the original bios and run startup repair from my Windows Vista disc, then had to search until I found a bios that worked correctly(I wanted to update to a Phenom 2 and needed a bios update for said upgrade).

But just be warned, have a backup if possible.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

question

how am i going to back it up? i don't have a floppy.

or will it let me do it on a usb flash?

edit: ahhh, create a bootloader? hmmm

Message edited by jtballer on 11-08-2009 at 08:01:21 PM

Reply to jtballer

You should be able to back it up to a flash drive, but again, this is not something that I possess expertise with, perhaps Ohiou can help you with backing it up before flashing.

i'm reading about the windows one now, seems a lot more easy.

gonna try this soon!

Reply to jtballer

Mine might be different, but my gigabyte board you simply booted with a usb drive inserted, went into the bios and proceeded as though you were going to flash the bios, and it gave an option to save the current bios there. Then you could save it, then reflash.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

If I read correctly you've got this board correct?

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support [...] #anchor_os

I would definitely recommend doing the bios backup if possible. Like I said, my board is a Gigabyte, an older AMD board, but their bios revisions seemed a little whacky.

*Edit..if this is your board, look on page 50-51 of your manual, it looks like you can at least backup to your hard drive. So if you can do that, maybe you could also back it up to a flash drive in case something would go bonkers.

*Double edit-Look at page 35 as well, it looks similar to what my bios gives as options, I think I was able to do everything I needed from within the Q-flash utility. But my board is a couple of years old now, so yours may be slightly different, but mine was not too bad.

The other idea, if the flashes don't work, you could partition the drive into sizes less than 1 tb to make it think you have multiple drives. The advantage to doing it this way is you can put any important files or things you know you want to keep on the secondary partition, if you upgrade the OS or want to reinstall for some reason, you can just blow away the main partition and have all your data backed up for when you are up and running again.

Message edited by ohiou_grad_06 on 11-08-2009 at 11:36:00 PM

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

i'm going to do the windows one where the utility downloads it for me and does it itself.

so if i backup the current bios, it will let me go back and fix the board if something happens to go wrong while attempting to update? just put the current one on a usb flash drive?

Reply to jtballer

Oops you replied while I was editing.

On mine, I used the bios utility I pointed to in the manual. All I did was put the new bios onto a flash drive after downloading, rebooted into the bios setup, entered Q-flash utility, and it allowed me to backup the original bios. When I needed to go back to the original after having issues, I was able to boot back into the bios with the flash drive in and reflash back to the original copy.

Just make sure you name them so that you can tell them apart. Also note on yours I noticed your bios appears to have a couple more options on the bottom of your main screen that I don't have, so you may need to look into those as well. The windows flash may work, just a little more to go wrong imo.

But what happened with mine, the flashes worked, come in to turn on the pc the next day and got bootup errors. Had to reflash and boot from my Vista Disc to run startup repair which got me up and running, but still. Had to go through a couple of versions before finding one that worked correctly.

On my board however, I think the bios versions they put out were betas and maybe not fully tested. Also, I know some versions caused weird stuff like the Ethernet card to stop working and things like that, so do your homework and don't just assume the latest is best. Had to learn the hard way a few times there.

Message edited by ohiou_grad_06 on 11-08-2009 at 11:44:14 PM

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

hey i'm a little swamped right now, but i'm going to come back and read through your posts again, but i think I'm going to try to partition the drive to smaller than 1 TB to see if it will show it in the windows 7 setup.

thanks for the replies!

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to jtballer

No problem man. Let us know how it works. If it does not work within the setup, here is another option.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/fre [...] nager.html

This little utility is called Partition Wizard. If I'm not mistaken it's what I used a couple of times. The Home Edition is free as well I believe, kinda nice for free. So if you can install on the smaller drive you said you've got, maybe use that to Partition the larger drive, then remove the small drive and boot to setup and hopefully it will see things correctly. Feel free to check in anytime.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

jtballer wrote :

hey i'm a little swamped right now, but i'm going to come back and read through your posts again, but i think I'm going to try to partition the drive to smaller than 1 TB to see if it will show it in the windows 7 setup.

thanks for the replies!

I'll keep my fingers crossed that partitioning will work for you. There are advantages to partitioning of course for instance if you ever need to reinstall the OS, you don't have to wipe the entire drive, and you can better organize your data.

Creating a backup of your bios shouldn't be too terribly difficult, but I imagine if the bios update goes completely awry, it will be totally unrecoverable and require a RMA.

Like I said, it may be worth contacting Gigabyte and letting them know what's happening in case something does go wrong.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

So I just flashed the bios with the latest available from the site, and I did it through the bios. Everything went successfully.

So, what I tried next was to start windows 7 setup again and see if the drive would show up, and it didn't.

One thing I've noticed though... If I have the 10gb drive that windows is currently installed on only connected, when I get to the part where I choose if I want to update or do a custom new install, and i click i want to install, it will go to the screen that asks "Where do you want to install windows" and that smaller drive will show up.

Now, If I have that drive AND my drive that I can't get to show up, I will get this message:

Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code:0xE0000100

I also get the message if just the larger drive is connected also. So the 10gb drive alone will show up but both will give the message and so will just the larger drive by itself.

Also, I tried to use something I saw while on my way to setting up windows 7 that was in the reapair my computer area from the windows 7 disc. And in there, I could access the command prompt. So I tried to format the large drive again. I put:

format e: /q

it said that it was UDF file type? and then it asked for the volume label. i don't know what to put here. I tried to type it as it is shown in bios which is something like "WDC wd1001...." and i tried a few different combinations but it kept saying it was wrong.

I was able to format the large drive through windows 7 once and it said it was finished successfully, but then I remember when I was shutting down windows that something popped up that said it did not complete successfully. which was weird because it had been a good while since I had even did the format and then out of no where that message popped up.

But now, I cannot format through windows. It says that the drive is in use, do i want to continue anyway? I say yes, and then it says it can't. and tells me to close anything associated with the drive.

But the startup files and windows 7 is installed on the other smaller drive. Any advice on how to format the drive through windows and get around this message it's giving me?

siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh lol this is frustrating.

Reply to jtballer

hmmmm interesting, i went to disk management and created a new volume on the large drive to see if it would show up during windows 7 setup but it gave me the error message again.

so i went back into the setup recovery again into command prompt to try to toy around with the volume again and this time when i typed in format e: /q, it gave me a different message and said that it will all be deleted, continue?

and i did and format completed.

so now i'm going to try setup ONCE AGAIN and see if it will show up. probably not

edit: didn't work, same error message.

Well, lastly, i didn't get this error message before until i put in the windows xp disk and did the format which came up as an error after 3 hours. Before then, I was able to at least get to the "Where do you want to install windows" screen even though the drive wouldn't show up. But now when I click to get there I get that error message.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh what a mess lol.

edit: here is the drive i have:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136284

i think i'll just try to get a refund for this hard drive and just buy a smaller hard drive like maybe 640 gb or something... you think that'd work?

Message edited by jtballer on 11-09-2009 at 11:23:32 AM

Reply to jtballer

RMA ftw?

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Reply to aznshinobi

this process ftl

Reply to jtballer

I think a 640 gb drive is plenty. I know I've got a 320 gb drive, and that's about enough for what I use, but you can always add another drive down the road.

Reply to ohiou_grad_06

ohiou grad,

so ya think that will show up?

Currently, the IDE drive will show up but when the SATA drive is connected i cannot even now get to the list to choose where i want to install windows, because of the error message.

Should I try a smaller drive and see if it works? i'm wondering if perhaps it could have something to do with sata or ide connection?

edit: because honestly 640 is plenty, and i don't even really care i just want to be able to finish the computer at this point

Message edited by jtballer on 11-09-2009 at 03:30:42 PM

Reply to jtballer

My first time! i'm scared. tell me what you think... - Page 3

Forum Homebuilt Systems : New System Build - My first time! i'm scared. tell me what you think...