RC1 can't find suitable hard disk

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

OK this one has be a bit perplexed. Im trying to install Vista RC1 on my
system that is a AMD running the Abit KN8 mobo (which is the Nvidia Nforce 4
Ultra board) It has native Sata support, so at least under XP I don't have
to load any special drivers for the disks in order to install it.

I originally was going to install vista on a Disk I already had, but During
the install process Vista shows me my list of hard disks and I pick the
drive I want and it tells me Vista can not find a suitable hard disk. This
strikes me as odd, since it sees the disks. So I go ahead and allow Vista to
delete the disk, recreate the partition and format the disks and it still
tells me it can't find a suitable disks.

I then get aother disk (sata) and removed my current Sata drive that runs XP
and plug it in, One again, Vista finds all the disks I have in my system
(total of 4) to include the new disks, but when I tell it to use that disk,
it tells me it can't find a suitable disk.

I have Vista RC1 installed on another system that's an Intel based CPU with
a Abit IC7-G board (intel 875P chipset) that worked just fine and dandy.

I then picked every disks that Vista showed me and every one came back with
a unsuitable disks message

I'm at a loss, if Vista sees the disk(s) doesn't that pretty much imply it
should be able to install it's files on it ?

just an OBYW, I've updated the Mobo's BIOS to see if that would help, but
same thing.

Thanks for any insight.

Dale

 

[Steve Lunn]

I had a similar problem on a Asus A8N SLi -also an nforce4 mobo. Vista
could not install on my SATA-RAID array because it was unsuitable - but it
did manage to rewrite the raid disks boot sector! I put in an IDE disk and
installed on that but still needed to load the nforce SATA and Raid drivers
from a floppy so I could access the raid array.
What a mess!
Steve

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

Well, I actually found a fix. Thought it doesn't make sense to me. I have 3
SATA drives, in the BIOS I have the raid feature turned off, so they are
just 3 indepentadant drives. The 4th drive is a IDE drive. Again, I tried
telling Vista to install to all of the drives and it said no to them all.

I then unplugged all the drives, except the one I wanted and it work.
Through trial and error, it seems Vista will not install to the SATA drives,
if an IDE drive is present. Once I unplugged the IDE drive, it worked fine.
What I don't get is why it wouldn't install to the IDE drive. I guess it's
something in the BIOS or at least the way Vista translates something that XP
doesn't care about.

Note, I was able to plug the IDE drive back in and everything still works,
so it seems to be limited to installing.