Installer Crashes Immediately if Windows Already Installed...

[thaimin]

I was testing out a new system and came across one hell of a weird behavior. I have found a work-around already, but would like to understand the real reason and find a better solution if possible.

Setup:

• Motherboard: AOpen i45GMt-HD (a mini-ITX board with very little consumer presence...)
  
  • Intel ICH9M chipset
    
  • 3 Internal SATA ports, 1 eSATA, Can do IDE or ACHI but no RAID
    
  • No PATA, no floppy
    

  [*]SATA1: 160GB Hitachi 7200RPM 2.5" HDD

  [*]SATA2: CD/DVD Optical Drive

What I did:

• Set SATA to IDE mode (otherwise installer did a BSOD after saying "Starting Windows...")
  
• Installed XP from a nLite slipstreamed disk that integrated SP3 (no other modifications)
  
• Installed all drivers, nothing else
  
• Enabled XP to allow ACHI mode, switched to ACHI mode, XP works fine
  
• Made a new XP Install Disk with textmode ACHI driver based on the slipstreamed disk
  

Problem:

At this point is when all the weirdness happens. Either the original install disk or the one containing the textmode drivers fails to even load! It does ask for me to press enter to use disk (so it is not skipping that) then goes BLACK. Never shows the blue screen. Stays black for over 20 min when I give up. Does this in IDE or ACHI mode. Status lights indicate system is on, and there is HDD activity, but optical drive is not doing anything.

Unplugging the HDD allows the installer to get past starting up and just tells me there are no drives to install to.

Work Around:

I blasted the hard drive MBR and partition table into oblivion with KNOPPIX and the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=10M count=1

Which writes 0s over the first 10 MB of the disk.

Now both disks work, and ACHI mode works with the disk with the drivers built-in.

I made some dummy partitions with KNOPPIX and it works fine as well.

So what do you guys think is going on here? Why does a previous Windows install prevent another install from even trying to start? I plan on doing many installs as I work on perfecting a stream-lined XP install so this is going to get obnoxious...but I can live with it.

Thanks for any input!

Edit: Tested it again, immediately after the first restart during installation this problem arises, so even before Windows ever boots. Also, if a disable the "Please press any key to boot CD..." with nLite it still happens. Maybe something to do with a boot flag?

Edited September 1, 2009 by thaimin

[strel]

You say you installed in IDE mode, then you switched to AHCI. There's plenty of info around preventing you from doing this because because it causes problems with the HD. This could be of interest in your case, same chipset:

HOWTO: enable AHCI mode after installing Windows.

[thaimin]

That is essentially what I did, and it worked just fine.

Upon further testing, this occurs even after installing with the right drivers initially in ACHI mode and never switching it. So, it has to be something more than just that. In fact, when installing in ACHI mode upon the first restart before it goes to the second stage of installing it already has the problem. Additionally, if I switch the disk back to IDE mode and not even worry about Windows, it still has the problem.