Hi new here but hoping someone can help

Hoping someone can help.

sytem as follows

Gigabyte Mobo Onboard VGA/Audio AM2 Socket.
WD Caviar 160GB SATA 2 HDD
DVD-RW
Corsair Value Select DDR2 667mhz
AMD Athlon64 3500+

I formatted the Hard drive after installing SATA drivers, took about 30mins which if i remember is about right. Went through the graphical installation ok, or at least it seemed to. However at the reboot it goes to the Xp screen with the blue bar going from side to side and after about 3 mins a dreaded blue screen comes up but it restarts far to quickly to read anything. After that restart the usual safe mode options appear and they all have the same effect as above except safe mode which starts loading the drivers e.t.c then just freezes. Thinking it may be the VGA I checked in the recovery console to disable agp440, but i could not locate the file under svc.

After this i hit F8 at the restart enabled VGA and after hanging for a couple of minutes on the XP screen, the screen went blank and after a few more minutes it went through the screen size adjust bit, but then goes back to the xp screen with the words "please wait" instead of the blue bar and then hangs for so far about 20 minutes (as long as i have had time to leave it so far) which is far longer than i believe it should.

Any help would be much appreciated..

Just to verify/clarify:

You were attempting a Clean Install of XP Home SP2 from a retail Microsoft CD?

You pressed F6 to load the SATA/RAID drives for the motherboard?

Then you instructed the XP CD to format the hard drive prior to installation?


Also I am confused by reference to the Recovery Console. Did you re-boot the CD to enter the Recovery Console? If so what commands were you using here?

My first suggestion would be to try the install again. Let the XP CD do all the formatting etc.

Thanks for the reply

Sorry didnt explain myself very well.

I went through the normal install process. XP did all the formatting and the SATA drivers were installed at the start. It restarts after the text part of the setup and goes into the graphical setup. It gets down to 1 min left then reboots without warning. It is then that the problem occurs.

Since the first thread I pressed f8 to bring up the boot menu, told windows not to restart iin case of failure. This enabled me to read the BSOD that appeared. It reads UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_Volume and the error codes.

Since then I have tried CHKDSK /R and Fixboot in the recovery console. both did what they are supposed to do. It does sometimes get to the Logo screen then after a few minutes it tries to rezize the screen as per normal in windows setup. Then it goes back to the logo screen with please wait and then hangs.

The only thing i can think of at the moment is that the PSU I have is 500w 20 pin and i am currently plugging it into a 24 pin connector. I have no PCI card in so the power consumption should not be to high. WOuld this cause this type of problem?

Appreciate any help you can give.

oh and sorry the XP is OEM.

Sorry for my continued confusion but are you having problems installing XP or using it after the install?

It sounds like it is installed but not working; is that correct?

Have you tried a fresh Clean Install?

The PSU pin issue should not be a problem as most boards take either/or.

Unmountable boot volume in Windows XP

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000630.htm