fresh xp install causing hoohaa

[tris-]

my dad has just purchased a new HDD (ide) and a copy of xp home. on the physical side, the HDD is setup correctly. he installed xp home and as far as could be seen it went without a hitch. he then installed mobo drivers (its one of the asus nforce 3 boards), they seemed to go on fine. installed all drivers for the controllers on the board.

problems -

1) the onboard NIC doesnt want to obtain an IP adress correctly, though it should. its been reinstalled and doesnt state any probs in device manager. its details show an ip of 192.168.2.x and subnet 255.255.0.0. i have ofc reset the router and my pc is on the same router and working fine.

2) he also has a SATA drive installed. previously it worked and he didnt change anything physically with it. it was partitioned into 2 drives. on this install, he went somewhere in system management i believe and it shows the drive but only as one partition. the drive isnt visible in my computer BUT when i look to the bottom right corner where the clock is, there is an icon saying a device is ready to be removed.

i investigated that icon and its saying the SATA drive can be removed. well i tryed letting it go into a safe to remove mode and it just comes up with a yellow icon in device manager. restarted comp and its the same icon at bottom right again.

should also mention he hasnt activated xp yet, but i didnt think that would make a difference. or does it?! he wont do it till he can go online cos he reckons he has to phone some office in mexico and it will cost him a fortune. thats what a friend told him anyway.

hope thats enough info

 

[Kryten]

Theres a couple of known issues with some of the onboard nic's on nvidia chipset boards, however the latest drivers from nvidia's site should correct that.

Is the router set up as a dhcp server? Try setting the PC with a permanent address within the router's range and see if it keeps it. A few routers can be a little iffy with their DHCP allocation, I'd probably not think it's an issue with the NIC.

SATA - this is an odd one, probably another one I'd try fixing with appropriate drivers. It sounds like the wrong drivers may have been selected upon XP's installation - I'm assuming you or he had to hit F6 to select a 3rd party driver.
On most nvidia chipset boards I've seen, the provided floppy contains about 4 nearly identical SATA drivers (usually SIL3112 or 3114) and you have to choose the right one. The actual difference is the driver version (2000, 2003, XP) but it doesn't say that.
Try changing the drivers - first bet, in device manager update the drivers and let automatic updates try and locate a better one.

SATA devices are treated in much the same way as USB - and are indeed "removable" in the same fashion, hence Window's behaviour re safe removal.

Activation of XP won't have any bearing on it's performance - you have to wait for Vista for that little gem

 

[tris-]

kryten,
the router is setup fine. the onboard nic worked and obtained an IP BEFORE putting in the new HDD and installing xp again. nothing with the router changed at all between that time.

im gonna try reinstall the SATA drivers now

 

[Chilly]

Nah Kryt, the sata drive isnt the system disk so it wouldnt have needed f6'ing @ install.

 

[Kryten]

Ah, i see. Im getting old, you'll have to excuse me missing chunks of writing

I wasn't however referring to any router settings : I was suggesting fixing the IP on the computer side (i.e. if the router is 192.168.0.1, set the computer to 192.168.0.2 / 255.255.255.0 in the ip config wotsitthingemyjig) and see if that stays put.

 

[soze]

Do a ipconfig /all and see if your router is mentioned as DHCP
Then make sure the address you have is static. You either have a Static IP Address or a DHCP IP Address as if that machine was trying to access DHCP and failing you get a wierd address 194.0.0.0 or 197.0.0.0 something like that.

If you are not static do a ipconfig /release and then a ipconfig /renew this should come up with a problem if there is one.

 

[tris-]

ip issue is fixed now, was something to do with the comp.

still the sata drive is always staying in a safe to remove state :\