ASUS P7P55D motherboard and XPsp3 installation - freezes at format.

Hello all,

a couple of weeks ago someone donated me an older ASUS P7P55D motherboard.
Today It stuck it into a enclosure, and tried to install XPsp3 on it.

The install process starts well enough, but every time when I come to the
point where it wants to format the drive* it freezes (ctrl-alt-del doesn't
work anymore). :-(

*I've tried both full as well as quick.

Strange thing is, it recognises the drive alright, and it did allow me to
throw away old partitions and create a new one.

Does anyone recognise this behaviour, and remembers what the cause is - and
maybe how to solve it ?

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

R.Wieser wrote:
Hello all,

a couple of weeks ago someone donated me an older ASUS P7P55D motherboard.
Today It stuck it into a enclosure, and tried to install XPsp3 on it.

The install process starts well enough, but every time when I come to the
point where it wants to format the drive* it freezes (ctrl-alt-del doesn't
work anymore). :-(

*I've tried both full as well as quick.

Strange thing is, it recognises the drive alright, and it did allow me to
throw away old partitions and create a new one.

Does anyone recognise this behaviour, and remembers what the cause is - and
maybe how to solve it ?

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Boot a Linux LiveCD and test ?

Or use a USB key with a Linux on it (if you have no optical drive).

You could use "sudo gparted" there, and partition/format the
drive, then do storage testing in the file manager there,
to convince yourself it's not a hardware problem.

*******

As for install, I'd look in the BIOS for the
SATA port setting, and set it to IDE instead of
AHCI or RAID. WinXP has vanilla IDE drivers, and
won't need an F6 during the installation process.

If you do happen to have the small txtsetup.oem based
driver folder for AHCI/RAID on the driver disc, you
can always press F6 and offer the driver to the install
process. (You need to transfer the driver to a floppy,
even a USB floppy would do.) There should be a prompt
at the bottom of the screen, as to when to press F6
and offer the driver. Keep the driver floppy handy - when
I tried this, it accessed the floppy at two different
points in time, so loading the driver the first time was not
the end of the story. Leave the floppy in the drive until
the graphical part of the install is evident.

You can also slipstream a driver like that, into a new
WinXP installer CD, using NLite. That's for people who
no longer own floppy drives or have any floppy
diskettes to use.

If you use IDE disk setting, then none of that F6 stuff
is necessary.

My newer machine doesn't have a WinXP era AHCI driver. If
I want to install WinXP, I have to flip the ports to IDE
mode, then when booting some other OS drive, I have
to flip them back to AHCI. Running WinXP on modern hardware
is great... as long as you're not multiplexing a lot of
different OSes that need the ports flipped. A lot of
people will have already installed the others in AHCI
mode, which is why this becomes an issue. It wouldn't
be an issue, with a little support from Intel.

Paul