Im at a total loss

[scar~face]

Im putting together a computer new and used parts

so everythings together, but when i try to install windows xp, i get a funky blue screen error that says something about the BIOS not being compatable with ACPI. so i googled this error and someone told that if a press F7 while the installer is setting up, this should fix this, well it did, but now the computer cant see my hard drive (SATA). So i tryed putting in an old ribbon cabled drive just to install windows on, but when i put it in, the computer doesnt see the cd drive!!!!!!!

ARGH!

The Mobo is an MSI K8N SLI with a AMD athlon 4800 (used, but was working fine in other machine)
The ram is a pair of 512s and a gig chip (used again, but was working in other machine)
The video cards are pair of XFX GeForce 7300 GT SLI'd together (Brand new)
and the HDD is a 300 gig SATA (used, but was working before)

any thoughts?

[.Maleficus.]

Ok, I'm going to work backwards at this.

The installer doesn't see the CD drive (when you have the IDE hard drive hooked up) because of wrong jumper settings. One of them needs to have the jumper at the "Master" setting, and the other at "Slave". To check to see it works, you can head into the BIOS and looked at the Integrated Peripherals entry, and see if it sees both (I believe that's where you need to go).

For the ACPI problem, you probably need to enable it in the BIOS. I'll look around my BIOS for it, because I'm not sure where the entry is. I'll edit when I find it.

[scar~face]

The drive are in the right configuration (master / slave) and in the BIOS it doesnt give me the option of turning acpi on or off, just to change its settings

[.Maleficus.]

What are the options for ACPI?

[scar~face]

SWEET i got it, sorry to bother yall

turns out when i bought my pair of 512 ram chips, the werent matched pairs, i peeled off the stickers on both, and found the they were to different brands! (im a little pissed about that) and my mobo will only work with matched pairs, why this would cause a acpi error is really confusing me, but im worring about it, now it works!

thank you maleficus for your help

[.Maleficus.]

No problem, but I guess I didn't help much .

[luciusad2004]

SWEET i got it, sorry to bother yall

turns out when i bought my pair of 512 ram chips, the werent matched pairs, i peeled off the stickers on both, and found the they were to different brands! (im a little pissed about that) and my mobo will only work with matched pairs, why this would cause a acpi error is really confusing me, but im worring about it, now it works!

thank you maleficus for your help

Is that a common problem with motherboards? Just asking because i was wanting to purchase a 512 stick to bump my rig up to 1gig. Should i try to find the same brand or possibly even just purchase a whole Gig of ram? Don't mean to hijack your thread, just though i would ask here since it was already mentioned. It seems like a better idea than starting a new thread just for such a simple question.

[scar~face]

from what i understand, the way most motherboards work is the are two pairs of ram slots (usually two different colours) if you want use two different chips, they must be in two different coloured slots. If they are the same (matched ram) them they can go into the same colour.

so,if you want to use three chips, two of them must be matched, and if you want to use four, you need two matched pairs.

of course, this is just my understanding

[Luke122]

I've actually seen some mobo's that simply cannot install windows with more than 512mb ram installed. I had to take out half the ram to run the install, then after it was done, install the rest. Sad and strange, but what can you do.. BIOS update solved that one.

[luciusad2004]

hmmmm, My mobo only has two slots (its older microATX board). I was under the impression that the reason that you have to match ram sticks is for the purpose of using dual channel ram. I guess it will depend on how much money i have. If i have money to burn ill pay for a whole gig (or just buy a 1 gig stick instead of 2 x 512 since my mombo doesn't support dual channel). Otherwise if i don't have much money ill just purchase 512 and see what happens.