[Seranel]

I'm a fairly experienced system builder, and I recently upgraded my computer. I gave most of my old parts to my brother, including an Athlon 64 3700+, and ASUS A8N32 SLI motherboard, an old SB Audigy, and a GeForce 7800 GT. His old hard drive is having issues and is about ready to die, so he ordered a new one. The old HD is an IDE 80GB. The new one is SATA, 320 GB.

Now for the bizzarre: The XP setup utility for starters, only recognizes about 125GB of the new drive, though the BIOS recognizes all 320. Also, if we have both the old IDE drive and the new SATA drive plugged in at the same time, the BIOS won't recognize either the IDE HD or the DVD drive, though it can recognize the SATA HD and the IDE DVD drive together if the IDE HD is unplugged, which is wierd.

Pressing on with just the SATA drive, he was able to install windows just fine. The MB onboard sound also works fine. But the graphics card and PCI sound card don't show up at all in Device Manager, and when trying to install drivers, it states that there is no device present.

Now even more bizzarre: We plugged the -old- hard drive back in, untouched from his old system, and it loads the old windows installation just fine, and what's more, the sound and graphics cards -also- work fine! We're talking full-on video games and everything.

If that weren't the case, I'd figure either the sound/video boards or the southbridge were fried. But how can two seperate devices work perfectly in one installation of XP professional on one hard drive, and on another installation, not even be recognized? It has me stumped...

[ChRoNo16]

Windows XP dosent recognize more than 125gb as an install drive, what you do is install on the 125 and format the rest later as a storage drive or something.

[Seranel]

Thanks for the reply, though that was by far the most minor issue we had. Still, it's good to know.

It ended up being something to do with SP3. No idea what, but I had had trouble with SP3 before with that computer, an issue where it couldn't communicate with my monitor for some reason until I opened the NVidia Display Panel, then it would magically come to life. I worked around it for a couple months by going into safe mode and assigning a shortcut key combo for that program so I could open it once I logged into windows using memorized key combos to log in. Meanwhile, Microsoft Tech Support tried to help, but they were eventually stumped, so I fixed it by uninstalling SP3, then reinstalling it in safe mode.

Anyway, again, thanks for the help, but it turned out once again to be issues with SP3 and the hardware in that system.

[Triple6]

Actually Windows XP can be installed on a drive larger then 128/137GB however you need to have at least a Service Pack 1(or higher) Windows XP installation CD - which you can make by slipstreaming any of the service packs with a plain Windows XP installation CD.

The rest of problems sound like driver issues - possibly the lack of installing the chipset drivers for the motherboard before the other drivers. You may also want to consider doing a BIOS update on the board,it does address Geforce 7900 compatibility (possibly the 7800 as well) as well as PCI and PCI-Express Compatibility amount many other fixes. And then using the latest chipset and video drivers from the www.nvidia.com website rather then from Asus.