True Im.age 11 Crashed Computer During Install

[RPSchmidt]

I purchased ATI 11 from the Acronis site, downloaded it and installed it.

Everything went fine with installation; ATI told me I had to reboot the computer.

I rebooted the computer; nothing. I have power, the BIOS LCD on the motherboard indicates the system is going through the boot process, but the HDD will not boot; my CD/DVD-RW will not boot (it will not even boot my Vista installation DVD), and even my floppy drive will not boot.

My system had been running fine since I built it about six months ago. Now, I install one program and WHAM! I have no drives.

I am running Windows Vista Ultimate 64, 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Extreme 3.0ghz processor, Abit IX38 QuadGT, 3 x 320GB SATA drives (not in RAID), a Philips Lightscribe CD/DVD-R/RW, and a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD3870x2 video card.

The system has literally been a workhorse; powerful, fast and not one problem until I restarted after installing ATI.

Any help is appreciated. Right now I have a $5000 paperweight sitting on the floor and I'm pretty upset about it.

[DwnNdrty]

Wow! That's very disturbing indeed. If you cannot even boot the Vista Instal DVD, then I can't see any way out but to start again. Can you put another drive in place of the original and see if that would let the Vista DVD boot? If you have any data files on the original drive, you'll have to put the drive in another system to copy them off. Or if you can get your system to boot from a CD, boot with a BartPE cd and together with an external drive or a second internal drive, copy those data files off.

There was another thread about 2 months ago about another user wanting to use TI with Vista X64. I didn't pay attention to the details though.

[K0LO]

I think I would, for troubleshooting purposes, disconnect all hard disks leaving only the optical drive. Then set the optical drive as the boot device in the BIOS and see if the machine can boot the Vista DVD or any other bootable CDs/DVDs that you have available.

If the PC still won't boot, then the problem is unrelated to installing software and could be just a very unfortunate coincidence. Then I would suggest resetting the BIOS settings to factory default as the next thing to try.

[RPSchmidt]

-{ Quote: "I think I would, for troubleshooting purposes, disconnect all hard disks leaving only the optical drive. Then set the optical drive as the boot device in the BIOS and see if the machine can boot the Vista DVD or any other bootable CDs/DVDs that you have available.

If the PC still won't boot, then the problem is unrelated to installing software and could be just a very unfortunate coincidence. Then I would suggest resetting the BIOS settings to factory default as the next thing to try." }-

I appreciate the recommendation, k0lo, but the problem is the computer isn't even booting the BIOS visibly on my monitor.

I can see my BIOS post on the LCD readout on the motherboard itself (the Abit IX38 QuadGT has a LCD BIOS POST display and power and reset buttons on the motherboard itself for out-of-case testing) but I my video card never initializes and none of the drives initialize (although they indicate they are receiving power).

Of course, I can't be absolutely certain that this is any fault of ATI; but seeing the system power up fully, visibly being able to watch the POST codes and noting no other major issues with the system before installing ATI, I thought that perhaps something had occurred between ATI and the OS to prevent my drives from booting.

[K0LO]

-{ Quote: "...the problem is the computer isn't even booting the BIOS visibly on my monitor..." }-
Sorry, didn't realize that. Then I would suggest disconnecting all disks temporarily and removing everything except the video card. If you still don't see any video on POST then can you swap in another video card as a test?

[RPSchmidt]

-{ Quote: "Sorry, didn't realize that. Then I would suggest disconnecting all disks temporarily and removing everything except the video card. If you still don't see any video on POST then can you swap in another video card as a test?" }-

Good suggestion, k0lo, thank you; I will give that a try. If I can get the BIOS to POST on my monitor, then it is clearly something to do with accessing the drives.

[RPSchmidt]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

The BIOS had halted on an F1 to continue screen, which is why the boot sequence paused at that point.

The real issue, as suggested by k0lo, was my video card. Somehow my Sapphire Radeon HD3870x2 (just a few months old) has died.

I replaced it with my old card, a HD3650 and lo and behold, the screen came right back up and I proceeded past the post and here I am.

Thanks again for your help; I received similar advice on the Abit boards, so now I'm off to thank them!