Page 1 of Hard Drive troubles

Hmmm I have just bought a brand spanking new computer made up of parts that I bought induvidually. However I have a huge problem. When I go to install XP when it boots up, it says I dont have a hard drive installed. It is however installed into the case correctly. I have a 120Gb Maxtor S-ata hard drive and an Asus 7V600 motherboard and I dont know what is going wrong. If anyone can please help me, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Have you used fdisk on the hard drive as this required to set disc size/partition etc, the drive won`t be recognized till this is done

This is a hardware probem as Win XP does not require you to use fdisk or startup disks. I work for a computer firm and have installed Win XP onto lots on computers without the need for startup disk etc.

Does the BIOS (or CMOS which ever you call it) reconise the dirve at bootup? If not, check everything is pluged in correctly, checking that the drive is connected to the red IDE connector on the motherboard.

Hope this helps...
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Regards, John72.

sorry, i just realised you are using serial hard drive, does the mobo also support ide as this will be looked for first. you should be able to sort it in bios, i don`t think fdisk will support serial ata.

This item was edited on Saturday, 4th October 2003, 13:14

My guess would be that XP doesn`t have the drivers for the sata harddrive, when you boot off the XP cd at the very start of the process it says press F8 (I think!) to load additional RAID drivers (Or words to that effect). You need to press the key it says, then get the sata drivers onto a floppy (yeah yeah, I know, when I did it on my machine I had to dig up an old floppy drive and just install it for the install process! You can probably slipstream extra drivers onto the XP cd, but the floppy method works), and get the setup program to load them. This will then allow setup to see you use your sata drive.

Well, that would be my guess, let us know how you get on.

Tom


Edit, before you do the above, you need to make sure that the BIOS is seeing it, as pointed out by the others.

This item was edited on Saturday, 4th October 2003, 20:05