just finished building my 1st pc, few probs...

[Tiger]

it seems to all be booting up fine, ive set it to boot from the cdrom first and trying to install windows xp, it goes thru the setup, then says there is no HD installed?

im using a 200gb seagate barracuda via serial ata, this is the first time ive used this interface so im not really up on it and ive prob just done something daft

also, the little connectors that deal with the front power, reset leds etc etc

my power led had a 3 pin female where the rest only had 2, and the actual pins on the mobo are only 2 pins wide, how do i overcome this, i have tried just releasing the wire from the 3rd slot and putting it in the 2nd slot, is this correct?

any help appreicated thanks

 

[Dink]

you need to press an f key most probs to install mobo drivers for sata at the start of setup

 

[16v_jon]

boot from the cd the motherboard came with it will make an sata boot disk onto floppy. once made boot from the windows cd and when it comes up with "press f6 to install raid or ata adapter" press f6 then insert the floppy and it will load the drivers.
chances are if you have an sp2 windows cd it will work without the floppy you just have to press f6 when it brings the option up

 

[Tiger]

boot from the cd the motherboard came with it will make an sata boot disk onto floppy. once made boot from the windows cd and when it comes up with "press f6 to install raid or ata adapter" press f6 then insert the floppy and it will load the drivers.
chances are if you have an sp2 windows cd it will work without the floppy you just have to press f6 when it brings the option up

criky, i have a windows xp disc and a sp 2 disc but no floppy drive do i need one b4 i go any further then?

 

[Darren S]

It's easier that way. You can use a USB pen drive in an attempt to mimick a floppy drive, but I doubt think the XP bootup procedure uses this properly.

Like Dink says, you'll need the SATA drivers for your motherboard, and then extract these onto a 3.5" disk. When you get your first blue install screen from the WinXP CD, it will say press F6 to install 3rd party drivers. If you're lazy like me, set your floppy drive drive to the primary boot device, then the CD 2nd, with the HDD being the 3rd device and it will do this automatically for you. My mobo uses a Fastrak SATA controller and when it can't automatically resolve the HDD parameters, it checks for those on the floppy itself, without the need to press F6.

D.

 

[biojo]

if u havent got a floppy drive the only way u can do it , is to install win xp on a older ide hd , then do a drive copy after to the new sata

 

[Tiger]

if u havent got a floppy drive the only way u can do it , is to install win xp on a older ide hd , then do a drive copy after to the new sata

i have put a 15 gig ide HD in to keep windows and my programs seperate from my tunes etc

so i now have xp up and running on the ide, is it possible then to get the sata drive running from xp?

thanks

 

[biojo]

ye , sata works fine under windows xp , its just they never included the sata drivers on the boot section of the winxp install part, not even on winxp sp2 , bit disapointing of microsoft . but gues they`ll add it in eventually

 

[Tiger]

ye , sata works fine under windows xp , its just they never included the sata drivers on the boot section of the winxp install part, not even on winxp sp2 , bit disapointing of microsoft . but gues they`ll add it in eventually

ah, good stuff, ill give it a whirl 2morrow, thanks for the help people