Maxtor SATA drive problem

[ted]

SOYO Dragon Plus! MB
512MB RAM
1 IBM IDE HD and 3 CD/DVD drives
XP works fine on the IDE HD, if a tad slow.

Maxtor SATA/150 controller
2 x 300GB SATA HDs

Unable to install XP on either SATA drive while SATA controller is installed
into the SOYO system.
During installation, after the F6 request for drivers and selecting an
install drive, XP starts 'examining' the drives and never comes back.

What I've tried that hasn't changed anything:
- New Maxtor SATA/150 controller
- Unplugging all of the IDE devices
- Clearing the CMOS and reconfiguring to the slowest system performance
settings
- Plugging in only one SATA drive at a time

What sort of works:
The 2 SATA drives are visible in XP when I boot from the IDE drive.

I have an older Gateway that I plugged the SATA controller into. I was able
to install XP on both Maxtor discs with zero problems.
I moved the controller and discs to the SOYO machine and the boot
process(safe mode) failed with an error that the 'system' file was corrupt.
I moved the controller and discs back to the Gateway and have no XP boot
problems. I'm not sure that moving the drives like this between differing
systems should work, but it was worth a try. Isn't that what plug & play is
for?

Ideas?

Thanks

 

[ChrisC]

Hi, you have configured the drives in the sata bios right?
ChrisC

 

[ted]

What SATA BIOS configuration? My PCs BIOS doesn't have a config for SATA or
SCSI devices. I boot using SATA from the BIOS' boot order which has a SCSI
option.

 

[ChrisC]

Hi, what mobo have you got?
ChrisC

What SATA BIOS configuration? My PCs BIOS doesn't have a config for SATA
or SCSI devices. I boot using SATA from the BIOS' boot order which has a
SCSI option.

 

[ted]

I got it fixed. Weird.

I had to move the SATA controller to the farthest PCI slot away from the AGP
card.