Win7 x64 on ICH9R?

[MaxBurn]

Having a bit of a problem here, thought I would try out the RC 7100 x64 as I hear media center is vastly improved but I am totally hung here.

I have Vista home premium x64 installed and the upgrade to win 7 RC 7100 x64 hung in the starting services section, says restart to fix the problem, ten times in a row then I gave up on upgrade. Boot DVD repair options says it didn't find a problem, it says the last boot of OS was successful, which it wasn't but it did sort of gracefully exit the setup instead of crashing.

Trying to do clean install the installer won't let me past the select driver section with no way to skip that I can see. I assume it wants the ICH9R driver so I gave it the disk, it sees the driver but then errors out with iastor.inf could not be installed, contact the hardware vendor for an updated driver. I am trying to feed win 7 the "STOR_all64_f6flpy64_8.7.0.1007_PV" driver which should contain vista x64 drivers.

I am assuming the ITE drivers aren't needed just like in vista, win7 doesn't even see them on the disk anyway.

Motherboard is Supermicro C2SBA+II with Intel G33 and ICH9R. I DO have a RAID1 array defined on the board but this is not the drive I have vista installed on nor am I trying to put win7 on it, not that I can get to that point.

Thoughts?

Anyone else using win7 yet?

 

[MaxBurn]

Hmm, the explore option when selecting the drivers sees my array just fine. Maybe it is looking for something else? What could that be, vista only needed the ICH9R.

The upgrade rollback startup option was refreshingly fast and easy, back to vista desktop in a matter of a minute or so. Hopefully microsoft got something out of the experience uploads.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm only running 7 on my UMPC (ASUS R2Hv), but I will be running it as my main OS for my new machine.

 

[Bozo]

On occasion I have seen Windows installer fail because it did not have drivers for hard drives / RAID arrays, even if you are not installing on them. Win 7 might 'see' the Vista install, but can't write to the boot partition of Vista without drivers.

(Vista and Win 7 both create a 200Meg boot partition on their hard drives)

 

[MaxBurn]

Yeah, I don't get it. The boot drive is a 300g raptor with vista currently on it and that's where I want win7, there just happens to be a RAID1 array and a sammy F1 in the computer too. Maybe I will attempt again with the RAID drives disconnected.

The upgrade advisor saw my ITE8211 and said run windows update after the install to get that current.

 

[LiamC]

I had Win7 installed on a P5K Pro (ICH9) flashed as a P5KR. I had to modify the INF file to do it but it installed and ran fine. Mind you, install was to a SCSI boot drive and the drives connected to the SATA ports were individual disks.

 

[CougTek]

Anyone else using win7 yet?

I am using the 64bit version on a motherboard that has the ICH9R south bridge, but since I had no trouble at all (I did a clean install), it's hard to troubleshoot what's wrong. Everything here went well. I have no RAID array.

 

[Mercutio]

Change the BIOS to non-RAID mode or use the OEM preinstall kit to set up your drives and files. If you choose option #1, you'll have to add some stuff to the registry to make your array work post install without erasing the drive.

 

[MaxBurn]

Merc is this something special I would have to do for this release canidate / unfinished software? Did this many times in XP and several in vista with no issue, and before I got the raptor the array was the boot volume for a lot of those. All I have ever had to do is feed it the driver for a clean install. Is your point it won't take the TXTSETUP.OEM F6 floppy driver because it doesn't specifically mention win7 as the OS? I would think the upgrade advisor would catch something like that.

 

[Mercutio]

I've had issues with doing windows installs in RAID/AHCI mode on ICH9. Server 2003/2008, XP and Vista.

 

[ddrueding]

I suspect that since you used to have the OS on the RAID array, you still have some boot files there. 7 can look at your Vista install and know this. That is why it needs to see the RAID array before it will install.

This is also why I don't do upgrades or dual-boot systems without isolated hard drives.

 

[MaxBurn]

OK Merc, I just guess it's my turn now.

I suspect that since you used to have the OS on the RAID array, you still have some boot files there. 7 can look at your Vista install and know this. That is why it needs to see the RAID array before it will install.

This is also why I don't do upgrades or dual-boot systems without isolated hard drives.

Not really; the OS partition on that array is gone and the remaining partition was resized over that partition using partition magic and it's not a primary partition either. After that I shifted the SATA cables around so that the raptor was the first drive and put vista on that drive, no files anywhere else. I "may" have also done the vista install all by itself on the raptor with the rest of the drives disconnected. I definitely left my card reader out till very last, that thing hoses up drive letters brutally.

An interesting thing I just found poking around is in the root of each extra drive there is an ascii text file named $UpgDrv$ that contains one character which is the assigned drive letter like D and E. Must have been put there by the upgrade. I guess that's one way to keep track of things?? No other files in the root of either of the non OS drives, generally the way I like it.

I'll just pull out the array and second drive to reattempt the upgrade, failing that a clean install. Just need the time now which will likely be the weekend.

 

[MaxBurn]

Bah, I am clueless now. I pulled out all drives except the OS drive and turned off RAID in the BIOS. Heck I even pulled out my USB multi card reader. What the heck driver could it possibly be looking for? This is a clean install, I just formatted the OS drive.

 

[sdbardwick]

Looks like the next thing to try is disabling all AHCI modes in the BIOS (but you knew that...). IIRC, Win7 gave me issues with some Intel chipsets if I left any AHCI modes enabled at install, but I can't remember which chipsets or if it was the 7100 build (RC) or 7000 (first public beta).

 

[MaxBurn]

Just tried AHCI both on and off and the AHCI legacy compatible modes. None of those combinations made a difference. I have to conclude that the installer isn't looking for a storage driver??

 

[MaxBurn]

I also tried pulling out my BD SATA drive.

 

[sdbardwick]

I'm out of real ideas, so I'll thow out one oddball suggestion.
A while back I couldn't get Vista to install on a single HD system; couldn't get it to find a valid install location even after deleting/creating/formatting a single whole drive partition. Finally resorted to a disk utility to zero out the first track of the HDD (something from an Ultimate Boot CD, IIRC) so it looked like a fresh-from-manufacturer drive. Installed just fine after that, and has been working fine for about a year now.

 

[MaxBurn]

Funny thing is I restored my vista and tried some other things, the installer can see the OS drive and I can navigate around in the windows directory for example. It can see the drive and work with it just fine.

 

[MaxBurn]

Well I learned something.

Took a fresh hard drive and did a clean install of vista on it (needed the F6 ICH9R drivers) and left RAID on and everything, no problem. Then attempted win7 upgrade, similar problem but I ran into a little more info, picture below.

ITE driver? What the hell, Vista has that built in. Intel doesn't have anything listed for Vista or win7 ITE, because it is supposed to be built in I would guess. I tried feeding it the XP x64 ITE driver for the heck of it but of course it didn't like that either. I know there are other people running the same chipset out ther with win7...

 

[Mercutio]

Windows 7, just like Vista, uses the .WIM packaging scheme to build an image based install. What you might try to do is update the package with a newer collection of Intel chipset drivers and install from your new image.

For that matter, there may be Vista/Win7 driverpacks out there.

 

[MaxBurn]

I'm working on the theory that my image or install media is possibly bad and I am going to redownload and reburn it.

Also I found that ITE lists a vista driver on their webpage that none of the motherboard manufacturers list.

I don't even have a clue on how to update a .WIM package with new drivers, but I am thinking it shouldn't be necessary if I either A, upgrade a vista OS that has drivers or B, feed the installer the driver using the usual process? Or is that meant to be a way around driver signing during an install?

 

[Bozo]

Try unplugging everything attached to the parallel ports or disable them in the BIOS.

 

[MaxBurn]

Fixed. The vista 64 ITE driver from the Taiwan Integrated Technology site did it. This isn't posted anywhere else that I can tell.

http://www.ite.com.tw/EN/products_more.aspx?CategoryID=3&ID=5,72

Win7 did not need the ICH9R driver during a clean install.

Disabling PATA or disconnecting the drives wasn't exactly an option when that's the drive I need to boot the DVD.

 

[Bozo]

Sometimes I'm a little slow...

I went through the same thing trying to install Server 2003 on a Supermicro motherboard. I ended up using a SATA CD drive to get it loaded.
Ther was a work around posted , I believe, on Newegg. It was in a review of a Supermicro board.
Sorry I didn't remember this earlier.

 

[MaxBurn]

My mistake was in treating it like it was vista, vista already has the ITE8211 driver in it and doesn't need it on a install where as it does need the ICH9R driver. Win7 was exactly the opposite. As much I read that win7 is the same as vista with enhancements, but there are many differences too.

Looks like it was worth it though, media center plays everything I have tried to play including DVD's ripped to files on the HD, torrents etc. Nice. Today I played around a little more and out of the blue it requested permission for an internet TV app, interesting, wonder what content comes through that?

 

[bumperboy]

I have a similar problem with ich9r drivers and win 7 x64. I'm trying to clean install Windows 7 Ultimate 7600.16385 x64 but I keep getting the same image:

:sad:

here is my system:

Intel E5200 2.5Ghz
Board DFI Blood Iron P35-T2RL
Corsair XMS2 DHX PC2-6400 4GB Kit CL5
HD Hitachi 320GB SATA 2
ATI HD4830 512MB DDR3

I've tried all bios options (AHCI, IDE, RAID) and none worked. Sometimes the setup finds the drivers but still gives me the finger saying that the drivers aren't correct

Anyone else having these problems?

 

[MaxBurn]

I posted my fix, you try this?

Fixed. The vista 64 ITE driver from the Taiwan Integrated Technology site did it. This isn't posted anywhere else that I can tell.

http://www.ite.com.tw/EN/products_more.aspx?CategoryID=3&ID=5,72

Win7 did not need the ICH9R driver during a clean install.

Disabling PATA or disconnecting the drives wasn't exactly an option when that's the drive I need to boot the DVD.

 

[bumperboy]

I posted my fix, you try this?

Yeap even before posting but the problems still here ^__^

 

[MaxBurn]

Oh, apparently your board uses a JMicron PCI Express based SATA/PATA chip. Look into drivers for that.

 

[MaxBurn]

Del double

 

[bumperboy]

Already done that too and since all my drives are SATA, no luck there either. Well I guess I'll try the x86 version. thanks for the help