Ok, I'll try to explain as much as I can.

I have a computer with a Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard with a AMD 64 processor.
I have two hard drives one is a WD740 and one is WD3000 they are both SATA drives (connected with the thin red wire, I think they are SATA)
I wanted to format both drives so I put in the windows XP installation CD (which came with the computer) it seemed to start running fine. But when it gets to the option of "installing a new copy press enter, to repair press R etc." I press enter and then I get the message "setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer" press F3 to quit.

I took out both drives and connected them to my other computer and formatted both drives, so now they are both clean.

I connected them to the other computer but it keeps telling me that there is NO DRIVE CONNECTED.

Right now I cant get the computer running, the installation fails because no drive detected, I made sure to check the cables are connected properly (not lose) and I doubt the drive went bad because they are practically brand new and until 2 days ago before I decided to reformat the drives they were both working fine.

I do not have a floppy drive in case it’s a BIOS problem, but if that is the problem I will purchase a Floppy drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

C. Weber
Miami, FL

RTFM!

It tells you how to set up your bios to recognize/run Sata drives as IDE. In your case, unless running Vista, you would want to operate as IDE mode.

Conversely, the manual also covers how to configure your Sata drives for operation as AHCI or in Raid mode.

The manual, should you have lost it or whatever, is freely available at Asus.

Wrong forum, please correct this in the future.

Oh, I'm sorry I havent posted on this site before.
where would I post something like this?

You'll need to provide the SATA drivers during the initial stages of the setup (you'll see something along the lines of "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver").

Otherwise, as CCT suggested, you can enter the BIOS and configure your SATA drive to run as a PATA or "IDE" device.

"Storage and Networking".

Some motherboards (BIOSes) have automatic detection routines built in for HDDs. In other words, they "auto-shift" between the HDD modes, SATA, ACHI, or IDE. When the board detects MORE THAN ONE new HDD attached most BIOSes will be expecting some sort of RAID driver to be installed. You can't run ACHI (single SATA as SATA) with XP and if the BIOS sees 2 SATA drives it expects a RAID driver to be installed. Therefore, in some cases the solution is as simple as only connecting one HDD, which the BIOS (sometimes) configures as IDE, then going ahead and installing Windows. That being done, THEN connect the second HDD, which XP would then allow you to configure as a "Volume" (storage drive). Thus far all of the BIOSes I have worked with have the "auto-configure" HDD feature as default. As always, your results may vary.


This is unless you want RAID, which is a different discussion.