80GB: Abit BH6 v.1.0

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Any help is appreciated. I have an Abit BH6 motherboard v1.0 and my BIOS flashed with the latest BIOS upgrade flash ss. I bought a 80 gig Maxtor Hard Drive to upgrade my 10 gig drive and have been in upgrade HELL ever since. I used the MaxBlaster software to copy the drive and I keep getting the 80 I/O error message. Also I formatted the drive in DOS with fat32 and tried to do a new install of Windows XP and I keep getting a blue screen. I even went a spent $55 on an ATA controller card with the same thinng happening. I also exchanged the drive thinking that might be the problem. Not sure why I'm having all this trouble because my BIOS see's an 80 gig drive. I even followed Maxtors advice and configured the hard drive in the BIOS manually. Is there naything I can do to fix this problem? Do I have to spend $70 for the BIOS upgrade from esupport, or will that even help me.

I was really hoping to get by with a cheap HD upgrade on my system before I built a new one.

Thanks for your time

[soupy]

Ok, let me see if I understand.

1. You're running an Abit BH6 with the latest BIOS.

2. You're using an 80GB HDD with an add-on EIDE controller card, and you DON'T currently have the drive overlay software installed.

3. You can't install Windows XP.

Please correct anything I have wrong.

Anyhow, the HDD isn't the problem. XP probably hates either your motherboard or your RAM.

Thanks for the reply. I've been running Windows XP on the smaller 10 gig drive on this system without problems. Also I took back the EIDE controller card because it didn't help any. I don't know if this has anything to do with it but, I have my bus speed running at 100MHz. Also is it OK to have a 80 gig partition using fat32?

[Denniss]

Better use smaller partitions on your driver for Fat32 or use a 16GB FAT-32 partition as your boot drive and configure the remaining space as a NTFS drive .

Please write down the entire error message you got and post it here .
Is your 80GB HDD configured as primary partition and set to active ?

I'll go through the process again tonight to get the error messages. Also the drive I bought specs are Maxtor 80gig Ultra ATA/133 Data Transfer Rate and 7200 RPM. I don't know if that has anything to do with it. Would I be better off buying Western Digital that has ATA/100? I know I configured it as the primary partition, but you do have me questioning myself if I made it active or not. I'll be sure to do all that again tonight. Thanks again for your help

Tried partitioning the drive to 16 gigs partitions using fat32 and it didn't work. Tried using NTFS and I still get the same error.

Basically during the install of the OS at the part where windows starts to copy files to the hard drive it crashes. Sometimes I'll get a error message saying "can't copy file somefile.sys. Would you like to try again?" When I say try again it crashes. Most of the time I don't get that message it just crashes. The error message is a page long but goes something like this: "Windows has shutdown to prevent damage to your computer. page_fault_error_in_nonpage_fault_area. The file that seems to be causing the error is setupdd.sys *followed by a bunch of technical*"

I have tried 3 install CD's which one was a virgin with the same results.

Should I just take a baseball bat to my system?

[Rainbow]

Bad memory? Test using GoldMemory http://www.goldmemory.cz

Thanks Rainbow but my memory tested good. I hate to be beaten by a computer but, it looks like I have spent enough time on this. One last question.... What would be a safe sized hard drive that I could buy that would work? ON there web site they mention they have tested up to a 40 gig drive (my bios upgrade link) the NV bios id is the one that mentions it. I hope my question isn't too stupid.

I want to thank all that have replied to me.

[Rainbow]

That drive should work with the latest BIOS for the board. Backup all data first. Remove all add-in controller cards. Connect the drive to onboard IDE, auto-detect it in the BIOS. Download the Maxtor diagnostic software, boot from that floppy and execute full test to make sure that the drive is OK.
Then boot from DOS/Win9x floppy (or install CD), run "FDISK /MBR" to remove any overlay software, then run FDISK and remove all paritions. Then boot from the Windows XP install CD and let it partition and format the drive.