IC7 SATA Problems: Help!!

[psmcginnis]

Just finished a fresh build and I can't get the SATA drive working properly. On-chip SATA is enabled in bios (I aready flashed to 1.3). Everything else is running at default settings in bios. I have the hard drive on SATA1. Only other drive I have is the CD-ROM on IDE-2.

When I try to use Seagate's formatting utility, it doesn't seem to work. At the step where I tell the utility to format the drive, the program closes and there is a message at the top of the screen: "remove cd or floppy and hit cntl + alt + del to reboot."

I have also tried formatting the drive and installing windows with XP Pro. Windows sees the drive and goes through the motions of formatting the drive. Then it starts to install windows. Almost immediately I get an error message stating there is something wrong with my hard drive, and I am instructed to reboot. When I reboot I get something to the effect of "ntld is missing" (I'm not sure if those are the exact letters).

I have tried installing formatting/installing windows with and without installing the Intel SATA RAID drivers that came with the Abit motherboard (using F6), with no success.

Please help! Very frustrated!!

Thanks in advance!

 

[psmcginnis]

bump

 

[psmcginnis]

come on guys, I'm desparate here

 

[mschell]

I don't know if the IC7 is different than the IS7 but I found on the IS7 when enabling the "onchip" SATA you have to also enable the SATA RAID option even if you are not going to use a RAID array but only one drive on the SATA cable. You also have to be carefull to specify SATA to use IDE3 and 4 in the BIOS if you have drives running on the IDE channels.