Alright, so first, my specs...

MB: Gigabyte GA-K8U
New SATA drive: Maxtor SATA II/300 16MB CACHE 7200RPM
OS: Windows XP SP2

So, like many other frustrated people out there, I'm trying to do a clean boot install of Windows Xp on a new SATA drive with no luck thus far. I bought an external Floppy, loaded the RAID drivers on it, loaded them into XP via F6 at blue screen, and when Xp goes to restart, I get hung up yet again. What the hell can I do here??? I've been working on this for nearly a week now.

After writing Gigabyte, they told me to place the jumper on the drive, because the GA-K8U only accpets speeds up to 150gb/s... therefore, I've done that with no luck.

The sata bios are working and I have my onboard sata mode 'on' in the MB bios, and the mode is set to 'raid'

Please help!! Thanks

You still have to install the SATA/RAID drivers before you can complete the installation of Windows. The F6 procedure won't work with a external USB floppy drive. It has to be internal. You can buy an inexpensive floppy drive and install it or you can maybe borrow one and temporarily install it just for the purposes of installing Windows although you'll have this same problem every time you want to reinstall Windows.

If you don't want to use a floppy, you can slipstream Windows XP and the appropriate SATA/RAID drivers onto a single CD and use that to install XP. Google for the procedure to slipstream Windows with the SATA drivers. There are several on the web.

By the way, why are you setting it to RAID when you only have one hard drive? Or do you have more that you didn't mention?

The thing is, I found out how to use an external floppy with the drivers by simply adding a few lines of code to the end of one of the driver files placed on the floppy. I know that the drivers installed, windows displayed this. In addition, I have also found that maxtor suggested simply ghosting a HDD with XP installed over to the new sata, subsequently making it the new boot drive. As far as the RAID setting is concerned, I was told to do this, even with a single drive from Gigabyte themselves. However, now that I've learned the ghosting technique, I went to go install Xp on my older maxtor 250gb ide but now I still get hung up upon restart (computer restarts and monitor eventually sleeps because nothing has begun the boot process. I have tried this now with
1. sata enabled and disabled in bios....
2. resetting bios to failsafe defaults...
3. trying yet another drive to load onto...
4. trying jumpers on both CS and MAS on the HDDs...
5. Attempting to install the SATA set to IDE

Therefore, I'm now stuck with a SATA drive, and two older IDE drives, none of which will install a clean version of XP... Not sure what to do. I've also written the IT dept. on campus for more help. This could possibly be a MB issue now...

I believe: Page 30 of your manual - connect the S-ata to Sata0 port (if they are 0 and 1) and in bios choose IDE 2 auto detect.


http://america.giga-byte.com/FileLis...nual_k8u_e.pdf