Installing Windows on SATA HD

[Gamer539]

I am trying to install Windows XP Pro with SP2, and am currently having technical difficulties detecting my SATA hard drive. I have a Abit AV8 motherboard, and the hard drive is a Western Digital SATA 160GB hard drive. I used the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools to format and partition the hard drive. What do I need to do?

 

[dfuze]

Can you see the drive in BIOS?
If not, you may need to turn on a setting in the BIOS.

If you have any IDE drives, I found that I had to unplug them (just pull the power plug out) before I could install XP on my SATA. Without unplugging it, it kept wanting to put some of the install files on the older IDE drives.

 

[Lawranch]

Did your motherboard come with a RAID drive floppy or cd?

 

[imported_nocturne]

Your mobo may require you to provide XP with SATA drivers during the installation. I'm not too sure myself, since the only time I installed windows on a SATA was on a friend's comp, and nothing extra was needed (was also a sp2 installation).

I believe while the windows installation loads off of the cd (while booting), you have to press f6 or f3 (or maybe f4, one of those keys, in any case). Then you pop in the driver disk that came with the mobo and load the SATA drivers.

Edit: On the abit driver download for your mobo, there is a VIA SATA driver and a Sil3112 driver disk file. Try loading both onto a floppy, and load them when installing XP. As for which key you need to press, when you boot to the installation cd and the blue screened interface pop's up, there will be a message at the bottom saying "press [this key] to load a 3rd party disk driver" or something like that.

If you don't have a floppy drive, you'll have to slipstream a windows installation with the drivers using a program like nLite, so they'll be on the installation cd to begin with.