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Please help! I am officially stuck scratching my head!

by golftango Aug 24, 2007 12:45AM PDT

Specs: XP Home Edition SP2, MSI-7093 (RS480M2-IL) MOBO loaded with an 939 socket AMD 64X2 4800 on a eMachines T6212. 2.5 GB PC3200 DDR RAM, 500GB (M) & 250GB (S) SATA HD, Nvidia 8600GT PCIe VC. The BIOS was flashed recently with MSI's Live Update 3.

Issue: I decided to do my annual reinstall of XP. I pulled the 250GB HD (photos, music and such) and video card. Switched the graphics back to on-board via the BIOS. I then popped in the recovery DVD that I've always used and reformatted and did the deconstructive reinstall. Again, I do this annualy and it always works wonderfully. Until now.

Now it boots to the XP screen, then the PC turns off and reboots...every time. I cannot use safe mode (shuts down too after listing all the files) and when I try using Last Known Good Config, it indicates that the system32 or something or other is missing. I have an older XP Upgrade disc, so I tried that, but when I get to repair windows, it indicates that there is no previous version of Windows? I do know that the Recovery DVD loads all the Win files, so I'm lost.

I'm thinking the BIOS re-flash may have screwed me up. I do not have a floppy drive. So I tried creating a boot CD by eMachines instructions to load the previous BIOS, but my machine does not load/boot the data on the CD even though the CD ROM is the first boot option.

I've spent the last week trying to fix this with no luck, can anyone think of something I'm overlooking?

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Did you check in the bios

by TONI H Aug 26, 2007 12:51AM PDT

to see if the SATA ports are actually active and marked to be bootable? This would be an ATA configuration rather than a RAID, so use your mobo manual to make sure the original configuration that made it work the first time around stayed the same after the flash of the new bios.

During the reinstall of XP, did you press the F6 key immediately when at the first page or so of the 'setup' in order to let XP know that you have SCSI drivers (actually that's how your SATA drivers get installed so don't be confused just because it says SCSI)? Those drivers will be installed later in the setup.

TONI

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