SATA HDD seen by Intel BIOS & not by MS XP installation

[Fly'n_Blind!]

Folk,

I am building a new PC.
Components: Thermatake Armour Series ATX Full Tower Case,
Thermaltake W0116RU 750W Power Supply,
Intel D975XBX2KR LGA 775 motherboard,
Intel C2 Extreme X6800 Conroe 2.93GHz processor,
2GB OCZ DDR2 800 SDRAM,
ATI FireGL V3400 128MB GDDR3 Video Card,
SEAGATE Barracuda STE 3250620AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3GB/s Hard Drive,
VIGOR Gaming CLT-M21 92mm Thermal Electric CPU Cooler
PLEXTOR 52X CD-RW IDE Drive.

I have assembled the above components, and fired the PC up. No Post errors, No flames, No Smoke.


The Bios recognizes the RAM and HDD,
but upon boot up, the following message scrolls onto the screen:

" INTEL BOOT AGENT PXE PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, Check Cable.
PXE-M0F-Exiting Intel Boot Agent.

No Bootable device Insert BOOT Disk and press any key"

I ran the XP professional Installation CD and upon completion of loading, XP indicates there is no HDD present or words to that effect.

I did swap out the SATA cable connected to the SATA HDD, I tried connecting the SATA cable to a different SATA port on the MB. No change in the result.

I suspect that I have missed something in the BIOS setup, but am a newbie when it comes to the SATA setup.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

If I posted thread in the wrong forum, please forgive me.

Yours

Truly Fly'n_Blind!

 

[captaincranky]

Uh oh!

Windows XP won't run a SATA drive as a SATA drive without the raid driver installed, (at least not in an Intel board). You need to configure your BIOS drive instructions to run as IDE. SATA HDDs will only run without a raid driver in Vista, and it's called "AHCI'" mode. Press F2, to enter BIOS find the drive mode, set it to IDE, press F10 and save the changes, you should be on your way.

 

[zipperman]

Did you install the Raid drivers from the motherboard cd and the other
That are described in the manual.
This requires makeing a Floppy disk with the right files.

 

[captaincranky]

If it's a boxed Intel motherboard......

Boxed (retail ) Intel Mobos come with a floppy "Intel Matrix Storage Technology" Raid Driver which must be installed to operate SATA as SATA in XP. If, at the moment you're only using 1 HDD, then try my suggestion to configure the drive (in BIOS) as IDE.

 

[Fly'n_Blind!]

It's Alive!!

Hey Captaincranky and Zipperman~!

Thanks for the tips! She's up and running! I would have replied sooner, but my the hard drive on my old ball of duct tape (Dell Pentium III 500 MB Intel processor and 128 MB RAM) died (Quel dommage). That left me with the option of throwing more $$ at the old PC and buying a new hard drive and then reloading XP and with all the insundry service packs and patches. (Very much like watching corn grow on a cold day :-( ) or concentrating on where I went wrong in the new PC's setup.

Put a 100 watt bulb in my work light (damn these old eyes!) and doubled checked my SATA cable connections. First mistake I made was that I had installed the SATA cable onto one of the Secondary SATA contoller ports on the INTEL D975XBX2KR motherboard. After reviewing the INTEL handbook, I discovered that the 4 Primary SATA controller ports on the mobo were black and located a short distance away from the 4 secondary SATA ports (3 blue, 1 red). I had originally connected the SATA Drive cable to the red secondary port.

I then fired the PC back up and went into the BIOS Settings and discovered that I had not changed the Boot Menu settings to have the CD / DVD-ROM drive as the first boot source in the priority list. This change fixed the

" INTEL BOOT AGENT PXE PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, Check Cable.
PXE-M0F-Exiting Intel Boot Agent.

No Bootable device Insert BOOT Disk and press any key"

that I had been receiving.

I mucked around a bit more in the BIOS with a couple of false starts and finally the settings that did the trick were in the ADVANCED MENU of the BIOS. I left the "Automatic Mode" at its default setting (ENABLE), the "ATA/IDE Mode" I left at its default mode (NATIVE), and I changed the "Configure SATA as" mode to (RAID). That change was an experiment as I do want to establish a RAID on this machine in the near future. The S.M.A.R.T. mode I set to (ENABLE). I also turned the "Secondary SATA Controller" mode to (DISABLE) as an additional experiment trying to keep things simple for the install. (Don't know if that was necessary, but it didn't kill the setup. I have since restored that setting to (ENABLE).

I rebooted and used the INTEL "Intel Matrix Storage Technology" Raid Driver
floppy per your suggestion and installted the RAID Driver during the XP setup.

XP (a pre Service Pack 1 edition) found the SATA and the installation went smooth as silk from then on.

Thanks Again Guys!

Flyin_Blind!