Not find hdd boot devices with SY-P4VTP

I am having very weird behavior with boot devices using a new
SY-P4VTP. I will try and explain what I have tried so far:

- using a P4 2.8GHz HT, 400Mhz DDR Speed. Single 1G PC2700
- GeForce AGP Card. Seems to be working fine in simple VGA mode.
- Two HDD on Primary IDE, DVD/RW on secondary IDE. All drives are
recognized with correct information, etc.
- I can boot windows 95 from a floppy.
- I can boot XP from cdrom. It does the discovery of hard drives,
installs the initial copy of the mini-operating system files, and then
reboots. Up until here, everything is perfect.

My problem then:
Hangs up after DMI Pool message. I have tried HDD-0, 1, 2,3 as my
third boot device (after cdrom and floppy). I have tried HDD-0 in all
possible combinations (alone, first, second, third, etc.) I have
swapped the two drives between master/slave. Everything works as
expected, in terms of discovery of hardware, etc. It just seems to
hang up trying to boot from any of the hard drives. I never get an
error message (i've left it about 5 minutes).

After the first-pass install of XP from the CD rom, I can go into the
recovery panel and it sees the newly installed OS (installed to a
clean, formatted drive). I can read/write/rewrite both the boot
sector and the MBR.

This is driving me nuts. Its almost like its not even trying to boot
from those drives (except I guess it must be, because it doesn;t give
me a missing boot device error).

I even put in an old hard-drive, with an existing XP OS on it, and it
boots fine. It just doesn't seem to like the boot sector put down on
these new drives. Maybe a low-level format is needed?

What brand of memory are you using? Soyo motherboards have always demanded
very high quality memory. Simple no-name brand memory is the leading cause
of problems with Soyo motherboards.

Next thing to look at is how you have your hard drives jumpered. Make sure
they are both set to cable select and connected to IDE #1. In the BIOS make
sure all drives are set to AUTO.

Set boot order to:
#1 CD ROM
#2 HDD-0
#3 Floppy
(this is for installation of XP only)

Start the XP installation, when you get to it delete any exsiting partitions
and then choose the drive you want the operating system on. The top drive
listed should be used and then do a full format before continuing with the
installation.

If it completes the install and system works then change the boot order to
HDD-0 as first and CD as second. If it doesn't work, and your using cheap
memory I would look at that and if its quality memory I would look at
smaller DIMM size. Some have reported problems with memory over 512mb on a
single DIMM
"Bill McKenzie" <bill.RemoveThis@cartewright.com> wrote in message
news:5703d8e4.0408022349.3500e5f0@posting.google.com...
 > I am having very weird behavior with boot devices using a new
 > SY-P4VTP. I will try and explain what I have tried so far:
 >
 > - using a P4 2.8GHz HT, 400Mhz DDR Speed. Single 1G PC2700
 > - GeForce AGP Card. Seems to be working fine in simple VGA mode.
 > - Two HDD on Primary IDE, DVD/RW on secondary IDE. All drives are
 > recognized with correct information, etc.
 > - I can boot windows 95 from a floppy.
 > - I can boot XP from cdrom. It does the discovery of hard drives,
 > installs the initial copy of the mini-operating system files, and then
 > reboots. Up until here, everything is perfect.
 >
 > My problem then:
 > Hangs up after DMI Pool message. I have tried HDD-0, 1, 2,3 as my
 > third boot device (after cdrom and floppy). I have tried HDD-0 in all
 > possible combinations (alone, first, second, third, etc.) I have
 > swapped the two drives between master/slave. Everything works as
 > expected, in terms of discovery of hardware, etc. It just seems to
 > hang up trying to boot from any of the hard drives. I never get an
 > error message (i've left it about 5 minutes).
 >
 > After the first-pass install of XP from the CD rom, I can go into the
 > recovery panel and it sees the newly installed OS (installed to a
 > clean, formatted drive). I can read/write/rewrite both the boot
 > sector and the MBR.
 >
 > This is driving me nuts. Its almost like its not even trying to boot
 > from those drives (except I guess it must be, because it doesn;t give
 > me a missing boot device error).
 >
 > I even put in an old hard-drive, with an existing XP OS on it, and it
 > boots fine. It just doesn't seem to like the boot sector put down on
 > these new drives. Maybe a low-level format is needed?<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->