Mobo: Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 nForce2 Ultra 400 Athlon(XP)

I just built a new computer for the first time, and everything went great until it came time to install the drivers that came with the motherboard. I already had Windows 2000 Pro SP2 installed and was trying to install a few drivers from the auto-start CD that came with the mobo.

To make a long story short, I tried to install the drivers several times, only to find that, on the next boot, the computer would freeze during the Windows startup. The only solution seemed to be to reformat the C: drive and reinstall Windows, which I had to do three times before I located the problem driver, it was the "Silicon Image RAID Driver."

I'm going to be calling the GigaByte tech support soon to get their advice on this, but in the meantime, does anyone know what the problem on this might be? I'd installed the SATA and IDE RAID drivers during the Windows install, but waited on all the rest until afterwards. I don't anticipate needing RAID drivers in the near future, but I'd still like to get this installed so I can upgrade if I need/want to do so.

Thanks,

Matthew
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Oh, I see, that's different, installing the drivers should have been done during the windows installation, that's what caused the problem, I never tried that method, it's too risky, as you saw.

If you installed the raid drivers after the windows install, once windows was up and running, I'm not surprised you had problems, even though companies tell you that certain things work, they don't always, so it's best to be very conservative, and install deep level things like SATA and IDE raid drivers when windows is first installed.

The correct procedure would have been to install both sets of drivers, the SATA and the IDE Raid drivers, during the install. If you did this, and it still failed, there is definitely a problem, but if you tried installing those after the windows install, I'm not very surprised you had problems.

Windows isn't as plug and play as they sell it, especially for deep level components. I can hear our Linux friends laughing, since you can update pretty much any part of linux in real time, no reboot, including I think the kernel, not positive on that last one, but anything else, yes.
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