I have just upgraded my dad's PC with a new motherboard, Athlon 64
processor, and DDR400 RAM. I am trying to boot the WinXP x64 CD so I
can install it. After it loads all the drivers, it freezes saying
"Setup is starting Windows". I have left it for 20 minutes and it will
not progress past this screen.

The motherboard has a Serial ATA bus, but I don't use it. All of the
devices are IDE and are connected and jumpered correctly. I have tried
a different IDE cable and a different CD ROM drive. I have tried
disconnecting all of the USB devices. None of these make any
difference.

I have tried disabling ACPI in the BIOS but when I boot the CD I
immediately get a black screen saying that the OS does not have APIC
(sic) enabled, and that I should enable it in the firmware.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Mark

Just a quick update - I got a floppy disk with my motherboard which
contains the nForce ATA drivers. I just booted up the XP x64 disc and
pressed F6 to opt to use a 3rd party driver and put the driver disk in.
It then gave me a whole list of drivers from the disk, which included
the nForce ATA driver with "required" next to it. I selected it but was
given an error that the driver isn't compatible with XP x64.

So it would appear that I have bought a motherboard that supports 64
bit processors, but doesn't have any drivers for the 64 bit operating
system?!?!

spam@pinkdoggy.net wrote:

> Just a quick update - I got a floppy disk with my motherboard which
> contains the nForce ATA drivers. I just booted up the XP x64 disc and
> pressed F6 to opt to use a 3rd party driver and put the driver disk
> in. It then gave me a whole list of drivers from the disk, which
> included the nForce ATA driver with "required" next to it. I selected
> it but was given an error that the driver isn't compatible with XP
> x64.
>
> So it would appear that I have bought a motherboard that supports 64
> bit processors, but doesn't have any drivers for the 64 bit operating
> system?!?!

Go to the motherboard mftr.'s website and look for drivers. You can also
post in the newsgroup for 64-bit XP for more help:

microsoft.public.windows.64bit.general

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User