Hey everyone, I recently got all new hardware and built myself a computer. Everything else is working good as far as I can tell, the only problem was that I purchased a SATA harddrive which I mistook for an IDE. I don't know anything at all about SATA and I'm having a bad time with it. I've been reading my motherboard manual, looking for help on Google, and trying tons of different and useless things with the harddrive connection with no luck.

The problem is when I try to install Windows XP onto it... it will load up the CD and go into the HD detection screen where it won't detect my SATA harddrive even though it detected it as Master on POST. If I try to continue from that point it will just give me an ugly bluescreen error. I have a Linux CD which I loaded up and put on the harddrive without any problems which is how I'm posting now... But Windows XP just won't work :sad:. My harddrive is a Western Digital 200GB SATA and my motherboard is a PF21 Intel 925XE. The harddrive is currently connected to Sata1. I've also tried some smaller IDE ones I have lying around but then I have issues with the HD booting before the CDROM drive even though its set in BIOS. Sorry for the long read - I'm not sure if this is more of an OS issue or a HD one.

Hey there iByte, welcome to PCHF

The answer is a relatively simple one. When you go to install Windows XP, at the very first blue install screen you will notice an instruction at the bottom - Press F6 to install your SCSI or RAID drivers now. At this point, you need to put the floppy disk that you got with your motherboard (containing the SATA drivers) into the floppy drive. The drivers will be loaded and your drive will be recognized.

Well actually my motherboard didn't come with a floppy... It did come with a few CDs. I'll see if I can download them from the motherboard's website though. Thanks :smiley:

Well I found a driver on the motherboard's website but I couldn't see anything in the download that would make a floppy... After that I examined the driver CD that came with the motherboard. I made a floppy of some RAID drivers from it and loaded them through F6 during the installation. It recognized 4 or 5 different drivers (None of them had a title I understood) I tried them all but still with no success.

Sigh, sorry for the triple post I can't find the edit button. I located the correct drivers at last, put them on a floppy and everything is working fine now. Again thanks for the help.

That's great, glad I could point you in the right direction.

Marked as [Fixed]