Need urgent SATA help!

[Spike]

I've just finished building a new machine. Everything seems well enough connected.

the only hard drive in it is a western digital 80GB SATA. I booted it, posted fine, and then went to a screen about raid arrays (there's only one disk - I don't want to use raid anyway) where it lists the drive. It then went on to the next screen (devices and irq's etc) and proceeded to boot from the XP CD.

XP setup then detected my hardware setings, loaded up, and when I asked it to install, it claimed that there was no hard drive present.

The reason I didn't post this in the windows OS forum was simply becuse I feel the same would happen for any other OS.

Can anybody tell me what I'm missing, or what I've done wrong? Can sata drives not exist as stand alone drives or something?

 

[mailpup]

I know you can use a single SATA HD as your only hard drive because I have a single WD 250GB SATA HD installed in my PC (one that I built in April 2005). Maybe you didn't install the serial ata drivers.

I'm not sure I remember correctly but at the point where it gives you the opportunity to press F6 for third party SCSI or RAID driver, you should have pressed it (even if you are not interested in setting up RAID. I wasn't either). After that, it continues and gives you a chance to insert the disc or floppy with the serial ata drivers. However, the installation of those drivers comes a bit later, I think (when Windows is ready to install).

Perhaps if you clear your CMOS back to default and start over, it will go better next time.

 

[Spike]

Ah! I forgot that was even there - but you'd think they'd acctualy say sata on th option!!!! lmao

OK, thanks for that, I'll gice it a go now. I dn't think I'll need a cmos reset, but if it doesn't work first time I'll do it, and if it fails again... ... I'll be back I guess. lol

Will let you know if it works.

 

[Spike]

Yes - taht did it. Thankyou very much.

 

[mailpup]

You're welcome.