Hey guys,
so, I bought a new PC back in August, but this isn't about that one. This is about the one I had before that. That one I bought in ~2009. It's still (kinda) neat, at least well enough for my gf (hehe). No seriously, It's way better than her crappy laptop with it's 2gb ram and a 2.6GHz Dual-Core. So here are the specs of the system real quick:
Intel Q9400 at 2.6GHz
VTX R7 270
4x2GB Kingston KVR 1333DDR3 Ram
Supermicro C2SBX MoBo
4x Seagate Baracuda ES.2 250GB HDDs
( Supermicro SAS733TQ RAID Controller)
So here's the deal:
I did a fresh windows install back when I got the new PC, but it kind of bugged out. I tried patching it to Win7 SP1, but it failed. tried to repair, restarted, tried again and so on.
Also, there was this horrible beeping, short, but continuous when you started it up. Manual said it was a heat issue, but I replaced the CMOS battery during troubleshooting and it has stopped since.
Anyways, back to the real trouble. The PC used to have the RAID controller in I mentioned above. The raid controller put 2 of the HDDs together to form a 500gb volume and the MoBo was also in Raid mode, So I'm not sure whether that mirrored the cards or if it was all on the controller. Anyways. I decided to do a fresh install with Win7, SP1 via USB stick. But it won't install on the HDDs and I have no clue why. I formatted them all (in the Windows install window, not mounted on another PC though). I unraided them in the BIOS, but still only 2 Volumes showed up instead of 4. I tried to install Windows on another HDD that I slavaged out of an old laptop of mine, and there it said the hardware was not compatible.
Another thing I tried was to unplug all the HDDs except for one and try and install of that, still nothing.
I also tried to install Linux on any of the harddrives, but that just craps out and restarts the PC as soon as you press enter on anything. (The USB launcher that is)
I'm almost at the end of my latin, one last thing I think might work is mount the HDDs on another PC, format them there and then try again, but I'm not sure.
May the Motherboard just be too old and I should try and install XP first and then Upgrade to Win7?
I'm at a loss guys, please help.