NForce install

[jobby]

Hardware:

Mobo: K8N Neo Platinum (Nforce3 250 based chipset)

CPU: AMD Athlon64 2800+ S754 Newcastle

GFX: Vanilla 6800 128MB

SATA1: Maxtor 160gb SATA150 (Boot drive, XP)

SATA2: Seagate Barracuda 200GB

PATA1 Master: DVD-ROM

PATA2 Master: IBM Deskstar 180GB

 

OK, so I downloaded JaS.10.4.8.AMD.Intel.SSE2.SSE3 from demonoid and booted up with it and found that only the Deskstar was detected. I don't want to mess around with this drive too much as it has loads of stuff on it that I can't be bothered to back up. So I dug up an old 20.5 Gb ATA66 Quantum Fireball, connected it as a slave on PATA1 and off I went. The install went fine if a little slow. On a reboot, my machine hung after BIOS detection of my hard drives. It listed all the connected devices and then just stuck. I disconnected the Fireball and rebooted and XP came up as usual. Reconnected and it had the same problem again. Did this a couple more times with same result. Then, I booted with the Fireball attached and NO PATA devices were detected. Disconnected and everything was back to normal. Any ideas for fixes? I seem to have created a PATA kill disk that stops PATA from working on this machine

 

Also, does anyone know if it's possible to do a VMWare install, patch it to get NForce SATA working and then copy the image to a free partition? I've got some unpartitioned space on the Maxtor that I could use.

 

Thanks for your help!