Ok im going to attempt to explain hehe I know the problem I have is something minor? :P



My specs-

Dfi lanparty nf4 ultra ?D on board raid controllers

Amd64 3200+ Venice

1 gig(2x512) corsair twinxms1024 (2.2.2.5)

EVGA 6800gt pci-ex16

Atx 500psu

2 seagate barracuda 80gig s-ata150

windows xp pro


The first thing after assembling my comp:



Booted up was trying to run off cd then would say disk error, I then popped in winxp it booted up went through setup asks me if I wnt to install windows did that then rqstd me to format specific hd like normal ? I did one of the hds went through that xp wntd me to reboot , rebooted . Goes right into setup again so I formatted other drive . To my knowledge when it reboots after formatting and installing window drivers it goes right into installation of windows but it just keeps repeating the process. So I restarted comp after formatting both drives it goes back into windows setup and now showing its partitioned on both drives in setup, one of them shows drive C: in windows setup when its asking u to format the drive?.. So I rebooted and hit f10 to set hd array. Added both drives to the right and setting it to stripping then exited . I then entered bios now before I added those hd?s it showed in bios in standard cmos my hds showed up under sata 1 and sata 2 after I setup array and added them in f10 when I go back to standard cmos they are not there just sata 3 and sata 4 , sata 1 and 2 are missing?. ? (im sure that?s normal)?.

In cd rom priority it shows:



Both my dvd drive and dvd burner



In hard disk priority its showing



1. Scsi-0 nvidia stripe 149.00 ( is the 11 gigs that?s already used up from the windows drivers that were installed, damn that?s big)
2. Bootable add ins



In removable priority?s showing :



1. floppy disk( it doesn?t show and specific name not sure if it should, is my floppy even working??? , it?s a sony)



Network priority?s showing :



1. Lagacy lan card





I rebooted again it shows up on booted up nvidia stripe 149.00 I hit f10 again and it shows same thing healthy hds both master so I exited. Now I just let it boot and right after it shows irq numbers and such then Dmi pool data it says disk read error occurred ctrl alt del to reboot.



So I rebooted from cd went into setup I then noticed I had a disk labed sata drivers I guess I do that before win setup by hitting f6 to install I hit f6 and nothing happens it then problems me unknown mass storage device scsi or cd rom yadda yadda hit (s)specify specific device or hit enter to continue , when I hit s it asks me for disk I enter disk in and it says please wait for like 10 seconds the nit prompts me for disk again??? Im like wtf??? So I just continued and it goes through same process as I explained earlier and when I attempt to pick a drive to install windows on it says Os already on not good to install windows on it again? but I havn?t fully installed windowsxp on one of them yet?



So my question is that disk I have for those sata drivers is that the reason why its not letting me install windows? Do I need a start up disk? Is my floppy not working? If I have a disk in floppy and booted and it prompt me to take out disk does that mean its working???



Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause , I just built this machine finally and I cant figure how to install windows on my hd hehe I guess im just a windows xp noob?.. I know u might get confused but its pretty straight forward I haven?t done much and I know I have everything hooked up right :P let me know if your confused L I don?t really have anyone to talk to or to help me out , I just know this comp will scream when I get it working right J

Welcome to the forums Vapor

Thanks for the explanation, always good to see exactly what you have and haven't done.

Right firstly would you be able to post your motherboard make and model, that will help with finding the exact solution.

As you know once you have formatted the hard drive it should restart the computer and boot off the hard drive, so make sure that when it reboots and displays the "Press any key to boot from CD" that you just wait and let it do its own thing.

If it still doesn't boot off the hard drive then it sounds like the machine isn't detecting the drive properly.

I presume your CD drive is running on IDE, for the moment only connect one of your CD-ROM drives.

Go into your BIOS and check under Boot options, make sure IDE isn't selected. You want to have CDROM then SATA (not sure if it shows up as SATA)