Help fellow Simmers!!!!!

[Guest ruby]

Hello everyone, my name is Ruby. I've been reading this forum for quite a bit know due to the fact that i'm about to purchase PMDG products. But I need your help with a problem i'm having. Ever since the first time I've seened a PMDG sim it drove me crazy and told my self that i am going to put together a wonderful computer specifically for MFS. I got a GIGABYTE Nvidia Mobo, 2 gigs worth of Patriot ram. The EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS video card a 600 watt power from ULTRA and a 250 gig Maxtor SATA HDD. Now heres my problem. I've looked everywhere to look for answers and no one can help. When I started my CPU I formatted the drive and started the CPU through the WINDOWS XP CD. But when the CPU restarted with the HDD the CPU restarts it self and never goes to XP. It will just keep restarting and restarting over and over again. The BIOS is picking up the HDD because I can see it at the bigging of the startup. Can anyone help PLEASE!!!!!!!

[phoenixphire 50]

I not the best for these kinds of things and I may be wrong but try pressing your F8 or F2 or F12 key and resetting the boot order so that it is not booting from your CD but your HD. Hope this helps. The keys may differ from machine to machine so give it a few trys.

[Guest D17S]

I'm assuming you booted the system from the XP install CD. The system went through the initial process. The system then initiated a normal reboot to continue the install process. The computer will not reboot. Right? Those Nvidia boards can be real rascals. First, make sure all the mobo drivers and loaded. Now, try forcing the system to boot off the hard drive by going into your bios and selecting your boot drive order to Hardrive / CD /Floppy. Shut down. Next, disconnect your floppy for now. Re-Plug your SATA HD into a different SATA port. Reboot to the bios. Make sUrE the HD is being recognized in the bios. Clean the XP install CD with soap and water. Now try another install. Let XP format the disk. If this doesn't work, the first install may have gone so badly that the new HD got whacked (Sorry, the Sopranos just ended. WTH was that? Anybody!??). Try to recover the HD by using the HD's utility to write zeros to your entire new drive, then reformat and try again. Of course, as always, a bad XP install CD, HD or Mobo are other possibilities.We're glad to try, but mobo mfgs generally have good forums that might be able to actually help. Good luck,

[lefteris 70]

My bet is that he forgot to install the SATA drivers that came on a floppy disk with the motherboard (or in a CD waiting to be written on a floppy). Either way, he needs to install those or - you guessed it! - restarts all over the place!Unfortunately, the only way to install those is right at the beginning of WinXP installation - thus, he has to redo it.

[Guest ruby]

Well thanks for the help everybody. I installed the drivers from the Mobo CD and still no good. But I'm going to try and install XP all over again because the first time I installed XP I didn't have the SATA drivers installed. I'll keep you guys posted. Thanks once again!!!

[MELKOR 5]

I had a similar problem with a recently purchased Dell 9200 system. Make sure you install Windows XP with _Service_Pack_2.Dell bundled my new system with Vista, but I wasn't willing to go with Vista quite yet. So, I wiped Vista, and tried to install my old copy of XP (No Service Pack level) but was unable to install successfully. After doing some research, I found out that I needed to install with XP SP2.After a relatively straightforward process of slip-streaming SP2 into my copy of XP (do a Google search on this, you'll find lots of help) and burning a new bootable CD, I was able to get XP installed without issue.Good luck.- Bill