Can't get any version of wondows to run

Alright, I just bought a brand new computer:

MSI K9A2 Platinum
Phenom 9600 Black Edition
2 x 1gig Mushkin DDR2-8500
Western Digital Caviar 250 gig
Sapphire ATI HD3870 512md
RaidMax RX-700SS

I even splurged on the OEM version of Vista Ultimate x64.

And for the last 3 days I've spent every free moment of mine try to get
some kind of OS to take on this pile of what appears to be trash, and so
far all I've had work is Ubuntu. I'd really like the 200 dollar program
to work though.

I've toyed with most of the BIOS settings and I'm at wits end. The
closest I've gotten to vista actually installing is a cursor I can move
around on a black screen, but most of the time it simply sits there
looking like night rider with its never ending progress bar.

I've tried swapping slow ram, older video cards, the HD works fine in
my dell and I actually used it to install a version of xp pro 64 bit to
swap bnack into my new pc...which hangs as soon as I try to type in a
password.

I'm sure I'm missing something simple, but I can't think of what it
could possibly be. So any insight would be GREATLY appreciated.


--
Nickaliss

If I was in your situation I would reset the bios and put back all the
original hardware and try again.

Do you have any error messages?

If that fails........

Try it again without the raid and set the sata drives to ide in the
bios. *-I'm no expert-* in this field but I read a lot stuff about
vistax64 before I installed it (without any problems btw) and this
seemed to be an issue for a lot of people.


Another thought!......how does the dvd look? any scratches? Maybe see
if you can open it on your dell.

If you have minor scratches you can repair yourself - at your own risk.


--
damocles

The only error message I've gotten is an incompatibility with the ACPI
settings. Adjusted that in the bios and that issue was resolved easily.
Other than that there's no error messages. It just hangs after loading
the files; HDD stops accessing, the progress bar keeps moving normally,
but sometimes it'll give me a black screen. It's not a problem I can
easily troubleshoot because it's not always the same.

I ran a few memory tests and everything seemed to pass with flying
colors. So like I stated I'm at a loss. Ubuntu runs flawlessly without
even recognizing my new video card (HD3870), so I'm led to believe all
my hardware is in working order...

I'll be trying fedora 8 tonight, hopefully that'll give me some
insight.

Thanks for the ideas.


--
Nickaliss

I had a similar problem with that motherboard not to long ago, I would simply
get a black screen and then nothing. I had my 2 seagate 250 gig SATA drives
in the SB600 RAID controller and the setting on "RAID" in the BIOS. I also
had my Samsung SATA CD/DVD burner in the SB600 and had set the BIOS to boot
off it first. When I put in the Vista-64 installation DVD It would get to a
black screen and simply hang, as if it couldn't read the disc at all. The
only way I found around that problem was to move the hard drives to the
promise RAID controller and activate it in BIOS while setting the SB600 back
to "IDE". Everything went swimmingly after that, minus the fact that I still
can't get VIsta-64 to recognize all 4 gigs of my RAM even with software
memory hole remapping enabled. Hope that helps, sounds like you may be
getting a little further in the installation process than I was though.

"Nickaliss" wrote:

>
> The only error message I've gotten is an incompatibility with the ACPI
> settings. Adjusted that in the bios and that issue was resolved easily.
> Other than that there's no error messages. It just hangs after loading
> the files; HDD stops accessing, the progress bar keeps moving normally,
> but sometimes it'll give me a black screen. It's not a problem I can
> easily troubleshoot because it's not always the same.
>
> I ran a few memory tests and everything seemed to pass with flying
> colors. So like I stated I'm at a loss. Ubuntu runs flawlessly without
> even recognizing my new video card (HD3870), so I'm led to believe all
> my hardware is in working order...
>
> I'll be trying fedora 8 tonight, hopefully that'll give me some
> insight.
>
> Thanks for the ideas.
>
>
> --
> Nickaliss
>