Ok, I posted 2 days ago about me being a newbie and putting together my first computer. Ok, well, with the help of Big B and others I have everything together. Here is the problem. I turned it on and it booted up, but after it does all of it checks, it just sits there and says "Boot From CD:" I don't know what to do from here. I tried putting in my Windows XP cd, but that didn't do anything. I didn't install a floppy drive because I figured I wouldn't need one. What is the problem? I want to fix this so badly. Thanks for any help.
Put your XP cd in the drive and then reboot. It should then go on to the setup. If it doesn't do anything then check the connections - is the cd rom with the cd in it assigned the master? Same for the hard disk.
Ok guys, thanks for the help, here are my answers: Is BIOS set to boot from CD-ROM? --Yes Is the DVD-ROM drive set as master? --Yes Are the CD/DVD-ROM drives registered in your BIOS? --Yes, my BIOS recognizes them. Whatelse could I be missing?
Doesn't do anything. I tried hitting F9 on startup which is something like "Express Recovery" or something like that. Then it brings me to the same black screen, but now it says "No HPA Enabled Drive, Press Any Key To Boot". So then I press any key and it goes right to the "Boot From CD" message. Is there some special way to hook up a SATA hardrive or something? I don't need 2 of them since my mobo is RAID capable do I?
It doesn't really say much. It says that it locates my IDE DVD-ROM, it displays the correctly memory and CPU, then it goes to that "boot from cd" message. I have a AMD 64 3000 with 512 Kingston RAM.
You only need a second hard drive if you're going to use the RAID function. The SATA controller will act fine as a plain storage controller.
The only way I got my SATA Drive to be bootable-seen with the GA-K8NF-9 was to set it to "stripping" mode in the RAID utility (even though it is the only DRIVE) and then selecting it as Bootable. The RAID utility stuff is in the manual. Oddly didn't matter if you floppy loaded the RAID Driver using this method. Additionally there is no documentation on which DRIVER to select although it probably be the NVIDIA 4 driver obviously - there were numerous undocumented ways to go wrong trying to get the RAID driver installed. Even so installing the RAID driver correctly (I think) still wouldn't allow the drive to be made bootable unless the set-up I mentioned is used. All of this was suggested on another board, but although it works its mighty odd, and there appear to be some issues with slow I/O - particularly in Windows install wizard at times. The documentation on SATA setup for this motherboard is totally lacking as the default set-up or setting up a single drive doesn't work and its small wonder that even fairly smart computer-geek can't figure it out. Nobody should have to cruise the forums of the internet to figure out how to get the MB to work. That is what documentation is supposed to be for!! This install headache is probably a function of this board being brand new and the BIOS and drivers being pretty rough around the edges. Currently my system is working with the set-up, but with some issues, and performance is not as good as I would expect it to be. Hopefully future revisions to BIOS/Drivers will fix the wierdness...
Forget everything I said, if you are only installing one (sata) drive into the Computer! Did you disable the IDE/Raid option in the BIOS? That should remove the need to install any RAID driver for install and the BIOS will "see" the drive as a non-RAID (lists as IDE on bootup) drive. The install should go ok. Look in Integrated peripherals page in the BIOS and disable the "IDE/SATA Raid Function" (you don't need RAID you only have 1 drive!) If you previously selected the drive as a RAID drive Windows might not like it and you might have to reinstall (remove partition, quick format and then reinstall) first. Hope that helps -- as I said the documentation is not very complete, or they assume anyone setting up the machine really knows what they are doing!
Glad that it worked. I think it be better for the default BIOS setting to have RAID disabled, since not too many people use it or are familiar with it. Maybe that will find itself into the next BIOS update.
