ECS K7S5A Pro OS loading problems

[newnovice]

Hi guys,

here is my setup, the box working fine untill i decided to upgrade.

i bought a ECS K7S5A Pro board with AMD Athlon Xp 2000+ with AMD heatsink and fan, 2 sticks of PNY 256MB PC 2100 DDR RAM, 40GB WD HDD, a CD ROM, and writer, Geforce 4 MX 440 SE 64MB

The motherboard was tested and the CPU heatsink and fan was seated when it was shiped to me. i have no heatsink on the small yellow(gold) chip right next to the CPU. mine is a generic case with a 300W PSU. after i connected the whole system, with i stick in the DDR slot, it detected my HDD CD, FDD, RAm, Video Card, and the Video Card Bios came up and then the board BIOS, i set the FSB and RAM frequency to 133/133. it detected the CPU as 2000+ and everything was fine.

i went into DOS and formatted my HDD, it showed as 39. some GB, and everything was fine. Then i boot from XP CD and try to load Xp, after i accept the aggrement, when it shows my HDD for format, it shows me a 7,838 MB drive, and 8MB unpartioned space. even though the harddrive is 40GB. i dunno why, after it tries to format the next screen comes up saying - " Format could not complete as there was a problem with the disk, other options tell me there is a virus may be".

the hardrive is fine, as i tried two different ones on this box, and also i was able to load OS from other box on same HDD, i dunno if it is the CPU overheating, PSU, RAM.

it detects the RAM fine, so no probs there. The PSU supports everything that is running, so that is fine. i guess the CPU is sometimes at 100F, is that a problem ???

Please help me on this, i have almost read all possible forums on this, i have flashed the BIOS to the newest version. there is no grounding. i dunno what is wrong

Help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

newNovice.

-i even tried loading 95, 98, 2000, Xp same problem. even Linux says it is not able to make partitions and quits

[jerrygarcia]

I didn't see that you f-disked to remove any previous partitions. Is this a new drive?

[newnovice]

i did fdisk it on the same comp, going to dos. it worked fine, just one logical dos partition and also set active.

i restarted then formatted to get a 39.6 GB HDD

did i have to particularly do the fdisk /mbr ???

[pickel]

Been there , done that !! What manufacturer drive is it????? Download the mufrs utilities and write zeros to the the drive to erase all the data , then fdisk , deleting all partitions and making new ones active, format and you should be good to go.

[newnovice]

i have a 40GB Western Digital, and an 80GB Maxtor.............

dunno how to do that, will try that. Thank u, will get back.

[jerrygarcia]

For your WD, you'll need Data Lifeguard tools.

For Maxtor, you'll need Maxblast

[newnovice]

Sorry i have the IBM Deskstar 41GB HDD, and i have the link to their utilities page.

[Peter M]

That's all gone wrong at the moment you dealt with the drive from DOS. DOS does not know nor use the extended access interface that's required to go beyond 7.8 GBytes - and consequently wrote a master boot record that covers only that much.
You now need to wipe the drive clear of DOS's silly workings.

[newnovice]

and how would i do that ??? clear away all of the DOS stuff boot it into another Box and format it, or use Partition Magic to format (clean) it ???

Thanks Peter M.

[Chuckiechan]

Do you have a windows 98 crash disk? If so, you can boot with that and enter "FDISK" this will show you your partitions. Go ahead and delete them.

Then put XP in your cd rom drive and make your bios boot from there first. XP should format and install for you, and will show you how much space you have available which should be your capacity minus a couple of megs.