Faults components

[TyN]

I am having a great dea of trouble with a system I am trying to get to work. Specs are

Asus P4B-M
P4 1.7 (socket 478)
512MB RAM (single PC133 DIMM)
Asus v7700 deluxe (AGP 4x)
Seagate ST340016A (40GB Barracuda IV), setup on primary IDE
Acer 2010A CD-RW, setup on secondary IDE

Initially I wanted to put WinXP pro on it. But after a install the onboard sound didn't work and I cannot find an XP driver for it. To add to that all the cool stuff on the v7700 can't be used because of no XP drivers. It seems none of this stuff has certified XP drivers and when I use the Win2000 drivers it crashes.

So I decided to go back to Win2000 and wait until proper drivers are released for WinXP. This is where the really strange problem happens.

I format the hard disk to get a 1.5GB FAT partition.
I copy the Win2000 CD onto the drive to make the install go faster.
I start the Win2000 install process - it makes a bunch of directories and copies heaps of files around.
The install asks me to reboot.
*** After the reboot the motherboard goes through the normal initialisation stuff (searhing for IDE drives, checking the floppy disk etc.) and before anything else can happen the message "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT" appears on the top of a blank screen :confused:

I cannot find any information about this message anywhere. Does anyone have any ideas???

Thanks

[rakki]

heheh welcome to the "press a key to reboot" club.

I just experienced it myself a few weeks back so I am pretty sure I know what's happened:

when you were setting up the partition, you didn't set the primary partition (da one you do da boot from) to Active. You can set this using good ol' fdisk (hopefully you have it on disk somewhere) or you can download Seagate's Disk Manager which is probably a nicer way of doing it.

Do that, and it should reboot properly :D

(i ran setup for win2k three times, each time taking HOURS.. until I figured this out)

Hope this helps :)