Installation: You'll need the basic Serial ATA drivers for the motherboard
on floppy anytime you want to access the drive via Dos or the XP install CD.
Make sure you hit F6 at the start of installation and install the SATA
drivers, else the XP install will not see it.
The first step I would take to troubleshoot is to start with the Bios and
peck your back through every entry. Making sure unneeded options are
disabled and the memory and CPU timings are set correctly. Actually, on the
memory I would set it to a conservative setting until all is running
correctly (if the board has dual-channel memory, wait til installation is
done to enable it). Unplug anything that is not necessary to install the OS.
I ran into some strange quirks with my current setup. I'm currently running
a dual hard drive (one SATA, one IDE) ASUS Deluxe setup. When I installed
XP, it was hell bent on writing the system files (for boot) to a small (the
first) partition on the IDE drive that I had setup for the XP's pagefile
swapping. The only way it wouldn't do that was to unplug the IDE drive. That
was frustrating. The SATA drive is suppose to be the first drive recognized
by Windows, but it doesn't work out that way. I finally gave in and let it
use the first partition on the IDE drive. My boot.ini file looks like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
Notice the rdisk(1) instead of rdisk(0). The SATA drive is the second seen
drive by XP.
Troubleshooting-wise: If all else fails, you could try the SeaTools
diagnostic check. They don't say they're functional with SATA drives, but if
it's recognized by the Bios, they should work. Then I would rattle Seagate's
cage about a drive replacement.
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
Rich
