Just got my Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 200GB 2000JD SATA and I am trying to install XP with hideous results. The board is a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 nF4 Ultra. It will NOT let me boot off the SATA drive at all. I cannot get any further in my Windows XP install because it cant boot the setup files after being prepped. I have tried pressing F6 but it doesn't seem to do ANYTHING. Even if it did, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Has anyone got ANY ideas how I can get round this? I don't have any IDE drives to boot off. EDIT: Ok, F6 worked but I don't have any 'drivers' on floppy. I don't even have a floppy drive and it refuses to check the CDRom drive. Argh.
Yup you need the drivers on a floppy Id suggest you go pickup a floppy drive from somewhere and d/l ther drivers from the gigabyte site or use a parallel drive as your boot. slater..
There are no SATA drivers on the Giga-byte site :s There are some on the motherboard CD but I dont know which ones need to be on the floppy.
Well on my board, you put in the mobo CD and boot from it, it then gives you the option to copy the SATA drivers to floppy.
You might want to check the SATA headers you are using - on my board, similar if not the same, only the nVidia SATA headers will work with the XP installer. Not even a need to press f6, i hadmy raptor on the SIL headers down the bottom of the board and had the same problem, no drivers and impossible to install to, so whack your XP drive on the nVidia headers above the GFX card.
Thats a good point attualy if its nforce 4 u shouldent need to install driver before hand should you?
Already on nVidia headers :s I tried booting from the mobo CD and it says 'No Hard Drive Installed!" w00t
clutching at straws here, set the jumpers on the drive to enable the 127GB disk limit and see if windows detects it?
No. You may have to delete all partitions on the drive to get it to detect it. I had todo the same with a raptor.
Well, nothing seems to work so my last resort is installing an IDE drive to handle my XP install then hopefully ill be able to setup the SATA drive from in Windows IF it isnt already detected. Is there anything specific i need to do to the IDE drive? Parallel? P-IDE?
Just to clarify - talked to ant about this on MSN Messenger... Ant has actually installed the first part of windows (gone past the formatting blah blah blah), it is just when it has to reboot to actually load windows (the 1st time you see the WinXP loading screen) - this does not happen - it boots back into the WinXP setup on CD. His drive shows as 131GB and he's partitioned that into 10GB/121GB and is installing onto the 10GB partition. It sounds to me like WinXP setup isn't writing a MBR to the HDD. He has tried setting all the boot orders to HDD0, and yet it still boots from CD again. Mobo issue / MBR writing issues? Maybe the mobo has some kind of MBR protection preventing one from being written?
The only thing I can think of is to check the boot-sequence in your BIOS? Make sure it's set to detect the SATA controller chip...
Not for nForce4. Or NF3, ICH5(R) or ICH6(R) for that matter eirther. Make sure you're using the NF4 ports, not SI3114 if they're on that board. Also, check your boot order. Set it to CD first to copy the initial files, then change it to the hard drive.
Pop the CD out of the drive 2nd time around? I still say totally remove ALL file system from the harddisk, or try and low format it??
My guess would be that it's the same idea as ASUS. When I installed my WD 250GB HDD, I had to use a different computer and load the drivers onto a floppy disk. In fact, I learned this because I degraded myself to calling ASUS tech support (who were, in fact, very helpful). Physically look around on the motherboard itself for all the major chips. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the SATA drives are typically controlled by the Southbridge. So whatever your southbridge chipset is, look around for that on the CD. Two thumbs up if it works! EDIT: I found that my hard drive REALLY doesn't like high frequencies on the FSB, and every time I overclocked it, it corrupted the MBR. Did you begin by overclocking your computer?
I had the same problem when trying to build my comp with sata. If you get the sata drivers on the floppy it works smooth. But for some reason, i have my two HD in the RAID sockets, but there reading as seperate HD. The bios on the A8V has to be side to IDE not RAID for it to work the way I had it.
All that you generally need to do is take the CD out. Or you could change the boot order to make sure.
