problem installing SATA hard drive

bartman

I have an ABIT AN7 motherboard, and up until now I have been using an 80gb PATA hard drive. I decided to get a larger 250gb SATA drive as the m/b has the SATA option. I disconnected the old HD, connected the SATA cable and power connector, and fired up with my XP Pro system disc in, having set the bios to boot from CD and checked that SATA was enabled. But it grinds to a halt before reaching the point of booting from the CD. I am stuck on the screen wich reads "Press <Ctrl+S> or F$ to enter RAID utility".
I would not describe myself in any way as an expert, but I have installed XP quite a few times on various computers without this kind of problem!
Am I missing something obvious?

Blacksheep1979

you probably will have to settup the raid utility with jbod (just a bunch of disks) then reboot. However you will probably find xp won't recognise the new hd unless you have a floppy disk with the drivers for your motherboard.

bartman

I have a SATA driver floppy disc which came with the motherboard, but I can't get it to read that from the floppy drive.
I have also tried to revert to the old HD, but I can't now boot up with that either!

Jzpop

If XP won't read the floppy containing the SATA drivers (when the installation pauses at the 'F6 to enter drivers' prompt, the best bet is to simply download the drivers again and copy them to another floppy. The thread below has good advice on installing SATA drivers for that motherboard, as well as a source of alternative drivers - it also appears to be very helpful to be using BIOs V19. See

http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?t=122643

bartman

Thanks, I'll have a good look through that thread. The only thing about the idea of hitting F6 when prompted is that I don't get that far! It doesn't start the process of installing Windows. Interestingly, if I go back inro the bios setup and disable "SATA RAID ROM" (this apparently disables the boot ROM of the onboard SATA chip), it proceed to load windows from the CD, but won't respond to me hitting F6 when prompted and ultimately fails to install because it can't find a HD to install to!

I saw on the thread a suggestion that my m/b doesn't support SATA2. So the answer might be to use a jumper to force the drive into SATA1, or perhaps I couls download an update to the BIOS from another computer?

Mr_Meanie

Change the BIOS (1st) bootup device to SCSI (2nd) bootup device to CD Drive and try to install XP again.

Blacksheep1979

if you have access to another computer (and still have problems with sata drivers) then you can download a program called nlite which will 'slipstream' your xp copy with any drivers you need and remove bits of xp you don't need.

banger9365

you mite have to go back to the bios and the sata setting ,where you turned them on and see if there is a setting for sata raid and sata ide (uses sata like ide)
It will say something like sata enable/disable and below it there mite be sata raid/ide in the options.
There has been on the last three motherboards i have had (gigabyte, biostar,and asus)
And you mite have to have it on sata channel 0/1 (the first sata connector)to boot or it will put the boot sector on the one drive and OS on the other