XP x64 won't install
 

Hello guys,
long time no seen! I have been busy taking pictures and fiddling inPhotoshop and get everything to work with printers, custom color profiles and stuff.

Here:

I have 4GB of RAM. XP doesn't utilize all of the memory, so I thought it was time to give XP x64 a run. It won't install. Why is this?

Booting from the CD of course, it runs and copies the usual first set of files to the HDD. Then there is a message: "Setup is starting Windows" (or something very similar) at the bottom of the screen. I sit there waiting for like five minutes, nothing happens and the computer doesn't response to keyboard hammering. Ctrl-Alt-Del - where are you when I need you?

What am I doing wrong?
Hardware should be ok, I think, ASUS A8N-Sli Premium with an AMD 64 3700+ processor. I see nothing in BIOS that should be ticked for x64. Any pointers are highly appreciated!

all the best,

Hi Unicorn, it has been a while :)
Are you installing to a SATA Drive? If so you may need to add XP64 Text Mode Drivers for your SATA controller. To be honest i couldnt get 64 to use all of my 2 gig of memory and it was somewhat slower than XP32.

Hi DoG.
Yes, a lot of water... and a lot of pictures. Life is busy.

SATA... of course. As I'm lost in space and time it never crossed my mind that the "new" OS I was gonna install didn't support SATA drives. With your reply it was easy to go find the solution. Now I have to find the drivers and fix the boot.ini and maybe just forget the whole thing and go for Vista instead...
:)

regards!

lol :) Life can really swallow time, you leave school and then you turn 30 something and not know where the years went!

Vista 32 is the one to go for ATM, the 64bit version is so resource heavy it can eat all the cpu time from samller cpu's, like mine, and even on the higher end AMD 64's it operates pretty slowly.

Thank you.

My short Vista story: I downloaded Vista RC1 32-bit verison, run the setup and at the first reboot I got the BSOD all over. Also when trying safe mode. And yes, the computer should be able to handle Vista, 32 and 54 for all what matters. Feeling a little desperate I even run the "online check for Vista compatibility" and the machine passed. Oh well. Maybe I have more time to look into this next week.
Thank you for the tips.