oudeis on 15/11/2009 at 07:42

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A couple months ago I put together a new system, listed below. I ran into a weird problem that I couldn't figure out, and neither could my friends (we all work in IT, embarrassingly enough :erm:). I'm currently running Windows 7 RTM only and am getting ready to reinstall Server 2008, Centos, and Hackintosh and figured I'd see what you all think happened and if it's likely to happen again.


Old hardware
* Foxconn 6100K8MA-RS socket 939 motherboard
* Opteron 180
* WD Velociraptor 150 with 4 OS partitions (below)
* Seagate 500GB SATA drive with 4 swap partitions (below)
New hardware
* Biostar TA790GXB A2+ socket AM2+ motherboard
* Phenom II X4 940BE
* Second Velociraptor 150
* OCZ Reaper PC2 6400 2x2gig RAM (2 sets, 8gigs total)



I bought my new rig and sold the old one, minus harddrives, to my friend. My system drive, the Raptor, had the following partitions in order of installation: Windows XP SP1A, Windows 2008 Enterprise Server, CentOS 5 Linux, and Windows 7 RC1. I created dedicated swap partitions for each OS on the Seagate drive. Since I purchased a new 150GB Raptor when I got the new board and chip I decided to use that for my new system drive and reformat the old one.

When I installed Win7 on the new Raptor it was the only drive in the new case. The Win7 Installation went smoothly, so after powering down I connected the two drives from my old system, set the boot order in the bios and rebooted. The system booted up with no issues and recognized the old drives and all their partitions. Because I didn't understand that Win7 created a 'System Reserved' partition I thought I had screwed up somehow, so I decided to reformat and reinstall the OS. This was where things got weird.

After setting the computer to boot from the DVD drive, I restarted and launched the installer. 7 went through the usual drill- examining system, copying files, etc- went to the OS installation screen, and froze. It just wouldn't progress past the 'Windows setup is starting' message, or whatever it says at that point. I shut the power off, restarted, and hit the same wall. To shorten what could be a long account, I ended up trying every permutation I could think of: using the old system drive, the old data drive, and the new Raptor drive each as the sole drive in the case; booting to the existing installations of Win7, Server 2008, XP, and Centos; trying Win7, Server 2008, XP, and Centos installation media. Nothing worked. My IT friends, who I've worked with and whose acumen I trust, kept insisting that the memory was bad even though it passed the board's built-in Memtest utility (which is awesome).

I finally broke down and broke down the box- took out the ram, video card, sound card, etc. I installed one DIMM, the new raptor drive, connected my monitor to the onboard video, and purely out of desperation, reset the BIOS. I booted and prayed. Thanks be to the Gods, the fucker went through the startup routine, paused, and proceeded to the Win7 installation screen. After I installed, I shut down, added another RAM stick, rebooted, shut down, lathered, rinsed, repeated. Once it had successfully booted with all the memory and cards installed I went looking through the BIOS for... something, anything that might prevent the issue from ocurring again and found a setting that would only allow the system to boot from a particular drive. I enabled that, reconnected the drives from my old system, and prayed once again for a successful boot. My plea was again answered and Win7 launched again. I copied all the data I needed from my old XP partition on the now-former system drive and then deleted the other OS and swap partitions.

So just exactly what the hell did happen? And what the hell fixed it? Another tech-savvy individual I know said that the MFT got corrupted based on his experiences with Vista and the problems it had with additional Vista partitions, but if that's the case how did it affect booting into XP, Server 2008, and Centos? I want to say that resetting the BIOS fixed it, but what did that clear that allowed a succesful boot?

Thoughts?