Windows 7 Startup Problems

There are two main modes seen with some board manufacturers. That would be ACHI or Native Ide as seen with the new build here running a Gigabyte board. When set to ACHI the new Sata III drive wouldn't run quite right and problems became evident right off with a clean install of 7 in progress at the time plus all programs in the restarts to follow.

Once the Native Ide mode was then selected everything went to work as it should! With the old build seeing an Asus board in the same series as yours is being the M2N-E I was curious if the model you have there has this while the M2N-E didn't since this was looked over here on the new case.

I see you went for the exact same Black edition model I have on as the host/boot/OS drive here! I had to plug the one here into Channel #4 since the first three are for Sata II drives. The fourth channel was intended mainly for seeing faster storage drives but a look at the performance gain was the thought there.

Once you get 7 on the new drive and have everything else back on then you will want to consider EasyBCD with it's own form of NeoGrub rather then trashing the 7 mbr entries. Unfortunately the 2.0 version for 7 is still in beta form at present while coming along well however and you would need to sign up over at neosmart if not already a member of the site there in order to download the latest build.

A custom install of ubuntu would see the root partition made into the mount point "/" as seen during the manual partitioning editing option for the boot files to be placed there. Later NeoGrub points the 7 boot loader at the root to see ubuntu as a new boot option in the 7 BCD store. It's not that complicated however to see done!

Sata II will be backward compatible as well! You shouldn't have any worries while the faster bus is now seen mainly for storage drives being on the last ports or channel on the newer boards. I had to plug the one here into the Port #7 on Channel #4 according to the way this board is designed in order to run it on the 6gb/s faster bus.

Disk #0 is actually the former host drive Sata II 3gb/s I wiped being in the old case but is used for any secondary OS on the typical Sata II bus. You will only see the full benefit of course when on the Sata III bus while that may come later the next time you upgrade if you still have the same drive.

Likewise a 7,200rpm drive will run but wouldn't benefit on the older bus for a 4,200 or 5,400 rpm drive there. You would need a Sata III drive however for a 6.0gb/s bus just like you would need a PCIe 2.0 card for the newer faster PCI Express bus there. Yet the 2.0 will most of the time work on a 1.0-1.1 PCIe slot for replacing a card on an older board.

You simply end up backwarding things a bit. Meanwhile let us know how things work out once you have 7 on.

Thanks! The most important thing however is seeing how things go once you have the new drive in and get 7 installed onto it.

Presently I've been having some fun on the new build with another hardware namely memory where DDR3 1600mhz 1.9v dimms are backclocked to 1066mhz! A new set of dimms will be 1600mhz at 1,5-1.7v to correct that one fast enough!

I for some reason don't find that one odd after getting into the new build here with the two ACHI and Native Ide modes you select in the bios. The Asus boards on the last few builds never saw this.

However loading the optimized defaults and looking over each sub making sure the drive is set as the default and enabling PnP and OS2 support may get you going a bit faster. Review the manual on that's board's particular options if you previously made any setting changes or may need to make one.

If you lost that or simply misplaced it in a drawer you can download the pdf version at ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support-

Chapter #2.3.3 and #2.3.4 are what to look at as far as the setting for drives in general.

You'll know fast how it goes since 7 goes on much faster then previous versions!