Newbie at working with SATA devices needs Help

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alarmman15613

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Hello All,
My first post here, so I hope I'm in the right forum. I did spend some time looking around first. I am building my first all SATA desktop and need some help. I have an MSI K9N6SGM-V Mobo, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ CPU, Seagate 320GIG SATA HD, Lite-ON 20X SATA DVDRW, 2GIG PC4200 DDR ram. I have a proper case , power supply, cooling fan (AM2), and a KFA2 GeForce 7300 LE PCIe 256MB video card. Can someone explain briefly or point me to a link on the initial setup of SATA based devices? I assembled everything, powered on, expecting Bios like with IDE, but I got nothing. It is running, fans, drives, everything, but monitor says " no signal" from what I gthered on here, there is a special driver to allow the SATA devices to be recognized? Once I get that far, I should be OK. This is my learning system on SATA. Any help at all would really be appreciated! Thanks in advance!
ALarmman
 
After you put it all together, did you install Windows? Once that is done, you then need to load the drivers that came with the motherboard (motherboard install disk). It's important to do this in sequence. Windows MUST be loaded first.
 
You should get a post and be able to get into the BIOS regardless of whether you used IDE or SATA devices. Something else is probably wrong. Are you using a cheap power supply like the ones that often come with the case? If so, it could be defective, even though it appears to power some items. I noticed you are using a much slower RAM than your system can use and I think you mean DDR2 instead of DDR. Anyway, it's okay to use that RAM but one or both sticks could be defective. You didn't mention a graphics card so I presume you are using the onboard graphics.

What version of Windows are you planning to install? With XP you may run into the SATA/RAID driver problem but with Vista you shouldn't. That said, you are not quite at the point in the process where you have to worry about that. You need to get it to post first.
 
Haven't installed Windows XP because the system did not POST on power up. I guess I have to look for other problems? I take it It should still POST and let me in the BIOS?
Thanks,
Alarmman
 
I am planning on runing Windows XP pro, but I have to get itto post first so I can access the bios. I'll try another Power supply, I have several more lying around.
Thanks for the suggestions!
 
Since you are planning to install Windows XP which is why I asked, you may need to borrow an IDE optical drive temporarily for installation. Try a SATA optical first and see but since there are no SATA controller drivers installed you could have trouble getting the SATA optical drive to be recognized and without that you can't run the Windows CD.

Then there is the floppy drive needed for the F6 third party driver installation (i.e. SATA/RAID drivers). The alternative is to make a slipstream CD.
 
Thanks to all for your help. The system is up and running fine. Appreciate all the tips and tricks! As it turned out, I did not have the CPU seated completely, which goes to show, take your time and double check the obvious!
Alarmman15613
 
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