Built a new comp last night

amd athlon 64 x2 6000+
Geforce 8800+ GT
Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - AMD Motherboards (mobo)
some no name dvd drive (sata)
hard drives from my old comp.



All went well until i tried to install vista. On first start up the comp couldnt find my dvd drive. Then after a few restarts it magicly found it. So Vista boots from disk, does all it should, then says to complete it needs to restart. there is only one restart in this whole precess. The drive im installing to have been formated, so its clean. So it restarts and pops up the screen to start the vista install all over again. Its not telling me to remove the disk while it does this, removed the disk when it restarted and all it said was boot error insert disk and press enter, or something to that effect. Now im noticeing after the many times its done this it takes a retarded amount of time to boot up and list my hard drives. What am i doing wrong here?

hope i made some since. Any advice would be great.

The first thing I'd do is double check all you connections to make sure everything is plugged in correctly and securely.

While Gigabyte has come on strong with their recent Intel chipset boards, they've always been a bit sloppy when it came to nVidia chipsets. If it were me, I'd flash to the latest bios before making another move: GIGABYTE - Support - Motherboard - BIOS - GA-MA78GM-S2H (rev.1.0)

The second thing I'd do, whether you flash to a newer bios or not, would be to go into the bios and check things out. First load the optimized defaults, then check to see that your hard and optical drives are being correctly reported. I would also disable the onboard video since you have an 8800; that may or may not be causing an issue, but at least for right now, remove it as a possible suspect. Assuming the hardware is fine, if things aren't being reported correctly, then you should flash to the most recent bios and repeat the process.

Onto the install:

Its not telling me to remove the disk while it does this, removed the disk when it restarted and all it said was boot error insert disk and press enter, or something to that effect.

If I understand you right, you pulled the disk out in the middle of the install? Don't. Remove the disk only when you're sure the installation is complete; if you're looking at the Vista desktop, then you can remove the dvd.

While I can't recall all the steps that take place, what I do recall is the amount of time it takes to install Vista. Just when I thought it was done, there's another step. That first step, the initial loading is short, it's what happens after the reboot that can take more time, relatively speaking. I recall seeing a message that said something to the effect of, "this could take an hour", but that was a gross exaggeration.

Now im noticeing after the many times its done this it takes a retarded amount of time to boot up and list my hard drives. What am i doing wrong here?

Many times attempting to install Vista or many times booting up not having your devices recognized?

One thing I'd add, which is most likely completely irrelevant to your issue, but still very important: you're really going to have to take care to manage heat. Everything about your board just screams "hot". You have integrated video in a northbridge which has one of the smallest heatsinks I've seen in a long time. Actively cooling it is something you should definitely consider, especially if you plan on using the integrated video. The 88's throw out their fair share of heat too, so when you combine all this inside a micro ATX case, things could awfully hot awfully fast.

So it has to be the drives i am useing. Vista just doesnt like vista and the reason i know this is cause im on my new comp with vista running lol. So sounds like its SATA drives for me. Thanks for the help