Windows installing XP to SATA: good except...

Hi All,
I got bits for a new PC today (hurrah!). Main spec is

Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard
Barton XP3200
1gig Corsair XMS3200 stuff
WD Raptor (not new version)
Asus Cinema FX5200 thingy with 2dvi outputs (looking forward to putting them to good use).
Windows XP pro

Anyway all this stuff is wonderful, but not much cop it i can't get windows installed.

First thing I realised was that i need drivers for the SiliconImage SATA thingy on the motherboard. So I put those onto a disk and did the windows installation again.

Windows found my hard disk, and reported that it was 35gbs, which sounds about right to me. BUT however many times i re-partitioned it (just using the windows partion manager) it was not interested in formatting the hard drive.

I did mange to get the drive formatted ONCE. However it took three attempts before it finally copied all of files successfully from the CD to install.

And then when it tried to continue the installation it just did flip all except go through the 'windows is the greatest thing sinced sliced bread' messages, which, especially towards the end, were buggered up (missing characters etc).

Is this likely to be a faulty hard drive? I thought they were supposed to be pretty good (5yr warranty and all). Could it possibly be a damaged windows CD i'm trying to install from?

If anyone was any ideas they'd be much appreciated!

Cheers
-Matt

 

Well, I'm no expert on this (and you probably really wanted someone like that to reply didn't you?) but I have roughly the same setup as you and the only way I could get my WD SATA drive to work was to use an EIDE drive as the boot drive, then install the SATA drivers, then make the SATA the master, then install XP, then remove the EIDE then boot from the SATA, then...

Have a beer

 

I've had problems with installing xp like what you had. Try diferent cd readers/writers. I've had problems with some. Also try playing with the BIOS settings.

Or do it Dusty49er's way. Since he has the same or similiar setup, it should work for you to.

you could also try installing win xp to an ide drive, installing the sata driver during setup. Then ghost the drive to the 36 gig.
I've ghosted drives before and all was well. try to use fat32 if you can though, makes using old dos utils a lot better.

 

One thing to mention..... have you got the latest bios for the board (2007 iirc) as earlier revisions apparently did not properly support the silicon image controller..... something to do with a conflict with the nforce chipset.... I had probs with photos going corrupt when I moved them around on the hard drives - bios update has cured that.

Hope that helps, hope you got it sorted by now anyway

Darkside.

 

My motherboard has the same Silicon Image SATA controller as you(gigabyte 8knxp). It can run in normal( I think they call it 'base') or in RAID.

My motherboard drivers CD came with drivers for using it in raid mode or in base mode. I put them on a floppy and had no trouble at all with windows(win2k) finding the disks, formatting and installing.

My only suggestion is to verify in the bios the SATA is turned on and not in RAID mode and then to verify you have the correct drivers on the floppy and not the raid drivers.

My mobo has a feature of assigning SATA drives to IDE slots if no IDE drives are present. I haven't messed with it but if your board has this feature maybe windows won't need the drivers.