A8N-SLI Deluxe Boot Problems

[dylandogg]

I hope some wise person can help me with my little problem as I've seen a few people around with the same issue and a resolution has never been reached.

I assembled my computer and used the A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard for my set-up.
Everything was working fine until one day I noticed Windows XP taking a long time to load at the progress bar screen until finally the progress bar stopped moving completely and the screen just froze there. What I eventually realized is that the hard drive was stopped being recognized by the BIOS midway through the XP boot-up process because when I hard rebooted the computer I would go into BIOS and noticed that my hard drive (Maxtor 250GB SATA) was not being recognized at all.
I would usually shut off the computer, turn it back on and the hard disk would be recognized again and Windows would start up normally. This would occur on a few rare occasions and I lived with it until today.

Today the same thing started happening, but I guess in the process of shutting down the computer, the power supply died and I had to buy a new one. After replacing the power supply the Hard disk not being recogized-Windows not booting up started happening again, except that the problem wouldn't go away after a hard reboot. What I realized, however, is that I can start Windows in safemode.. but starting it normally is still out of my reach.
If anybody can help me out or give me some suggestions I'd really appreciate it.

Here are my specs:
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD 4800 X2
Mator 250GB SATA
OCZ 2 GB RAM
XFX 7800GT Video card
Windows XP SP2

 

[donkey42]

the power supply died and I had to buy a new one.

what make and model did you replace ?
& what make and model did you replace it with ?

as you could be suffering from a lack of power

Edit: i would guess you would need a decent 550W PSU

 

[Matt]

Yes PSU like donky said could be your issue. It could also just need a bios reboot and maybe a fresh install of windows :( (hope that one dosnt need to be trid though)

 

[dylandogg]

I already have a 550W PSU. I thought it was windows at first as well.

But I was wrong.
Here's what the problem was.

I placed a call to Maxtor (Now Seagate) and asked them about the problem and they informed me of an issue with older Maxtor drives that have problems working with nforce4 chipsets (which my motherboard is).. They sent me a firmware upgrade via e-mail, I applied it to my hard drive and now everything works perfectly.

I think the new drives ship with the latest firmware but I bought my drive about a year ago.

So hopefully this solution works for other people out there with the same problem as me.

 

[donkey42]

glad you sorted it :beer:[ot]the reason i suspected the PSU was cos even if it says 550W it still need to be a decent brand PSU cos some decent 300W PSU's can power more than a crap 500W PSU, that's why i asked what make & model it was[/ot]