Asus A8N-E with HDD LED solid red

GAH !

Asus A8N-E, BIOS 1005 or 1008 makes no difference:
* I do Full (or Quick) Zero Erase HDDs, install WinXP. All is fine.
* Install nVidia nForce4 AMD chipset driver v6.66, without installing the Firewall manager (common nuissance). Reboot.
* starting to load WinXP, I see the "running blue bricks" logo. Then HDD LED turns solid RED and stays there indefinitely.
* I reset, I choose load with Previous Settings (otherwise same problem), loads okay, but I have to manually reinstall each driver. Works Fine.
* I install a few more unrelated drivers (sound, scanner, audio), suddenly the same problem again.

I went through this cycle a few times now. I'm in safe mode btw now.

I have a SATA drive. Tried channel 1, channel 3, same issue.
It's a Maxtor Drive. I did full drive scan, and it's "certified error free".

I'm considering pulling out Abit Fatal1ty AN8 I have and installing it instead of my Asus A8N-E and see what happens. Now ... it USED to work okay. I'm not sure what happens. I guess it's the driver of some sort or a program.

Is there a way to at least find out what the problem is ? I thought it'd be the SW drivers (nVidia's SM HDD drivers), but then they seem to work okay, but then after installing more stuff not working again ?

It looks like the problem was the AMD chipset driver from nVidia's site v6.66.

When I used a driver that came on the installation CD with the motherboard, all is well.
I'm also trying a v.6.65 driver that I got from Asus, and it works fine for some reason, even though there were not supposed to be many changes between the versions.

v6.66 seemed to have worked fine with single core CPU. I have a dual core one now.
We'll see what happens.

i didnt have any problems either with mine..hope it gets worked out

well, installing nVidia chipset from the CD works.
Installing one from nVidia's website (6.66) or Asus' website for XP (6.65) does not work.
I've been trying and trying for almost two days, trying to figure out what's wrong.
Oh, the tedium of reinstalling things and trying everything imaginable.

Finally I loaded one from CD and everything works perfectly !!

I'm glad it's resolved now and I can move on with my life.

lol good deal

You should install the latest nforce4 driver . In asus web where is bios download section says that you have to install the latest nvidia drivers if you want to use 1005 ar newer bios .

Back in the old school times, when I was working on a PC, it means that I gotten the IDE cable on wrong, gotten it reversed. LOL.

But, because it POSTed, it's because the HDD is bad or the IDE drivers are majorly bugged.