Windows Won't Recognize Hard Drives

[SageOfTheWabash]

Hello all, I was forced into an upgrade by a mobo failure. This evening I installed an "Asus P4S800D-X mobo, a Western Digital 500 gig hard drive, a Maxtor 250 gig hard drive both of them SATA. 4 gig of dual channel 184 pin PC 3200. When I enter bios the system seems to recognize the hard drives. However, when I try to install XP Windows says that I don't have any hard drives in the system.? What are some things that I can check or do to trouble shoot this glitch? Thanx

 

[beef_jerky4104]

When Windows is loading up it should say somewhere on the bottom of the screen (where it shows whats loading) Press F5 if you need a raid driver. OR something along on those lines. Then you press the key and put in the floppy that cmae with you Motherboard. It will probably say something like SATA Driver. Do that and you'll be able to use those drives.

 

[SageOfTheWabash]

I remember having seen that prompt before. " Press F? if you need to install a third party raid driver ". The MOBO came with a CD not a floppy, but I'll bet it will contain the driver I need. This also begs the question, which type of raid should I choose? Thanx for the heads up

 

[robin_bga]

does it give any options?if it does tell us what u see but u should put in mind that its asking u the driver that is compatible with the chip on your mobo.so if u have options related to your mobo,then choose those. R

 

[SageOfTheWabash]

I was wrong. I do need a floppy. windows says insert diskette into drive A, Apparently it will accept nothing else.

 

[Tedster]

which is the reason never build a computer without floppies. Still required for BIOS and core updates.

 

[scott_ottawa]

Sage

Look in the BIOS and see if you can find a submenu that looks like "Serial ATA (SATA)".

If you find this it may be set to Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI). Change it to

• SATA Controller Mode Option: Compatibility

Then install XP. After that get the necessary drivers for your m/b and chipset (maybe Intel.com has this).

Once you've installed this driver (sometimes called the Matrix Storage Manager driver) go back into your BIOS and set the option back to AHCI

• SATA Controller Mode Option: AHCI