can't find IDE drive to install XP

[Gordon J. Rattray]

Hi there,

I installed a new Asus P5LD2-VM and I have the CD Rom hooked up to the
secondary red controller.

The IDE hard drive is connected to the primary blue (80 pin) controller but
when the XP CD boots up, it says it can't find a hard drive.

At the BIOS, it lists the hard drive as being there, but yet the XP install
comes up with it saying that it can't find the hard drive.

I know this board has SATA connectors on it, but I'd like to be able to use
the IDE hard drive as the boot drive.

Any ideas??

Gordon

 

[Bob Harris]

A couple of thoughts:

A CD probably came with the hard drive to do things like partitioning anf
formatting. Such a disk maker's CD can "see" a hard drive that is properly
connected, even before it is formatted. Try the CD and if it can NOT see
the hard drive, then recheck the power and signal cables, look for some BIOS
setting that might be de-activating the IDE controller, etc. Read the
entire motherboard manual for tricks and tips about disks, disk contorllers,
RAID, etc. A bootable GHOST floppy, True Image CD, or Partition Magic
rescue floppy should also be able to see such a hard drive. But, if nothing
can see the hard drive, then you could have either a bad hard drive, a bad
cable, or a bad disk controller (i.e., bad motherboard).

If the disk maker's CD can "see" the disk, but the XP CD can not, that might
be a driver issue. For example, if the IDE disk is on a RAID contoller, you
need to hit F6 early in the XP installation to load the RAID driver from a
floppy. Such a driver would come with the motherboard, probably on a CD,
but must be coipied to a floppy to work with XP. You may not want RAID.
With a single disk you can not really do RAID. But, XP might want the drive
just to recognize the controller.

XP is very particular about using an 80-pin cable with ATA/100 or ATA/133
disks. Win98 would have let you use a 40-pin cable.

 

[Ice Bing]

Check your IDE HD and CDROM jumper...


Ice Cool,

 

[Anna]

Check your IDE HD and CDROM jumper...

Gordon:
We'll assume both drives are non-defective and that both drives are
correctly jumpered.

Disconnect your CD-ROM drive from the ITE IDE (red) connector and reconnect
it as a Slave on the Primary IDE connector. See if that works.

Check your Boot Priority settings in the BIOS to ensure all is well.
Anna

 

[Fitz]

If this is a new, unformatted HD that came with a bootable utility disk
(such as Maxblast), use that disk to format (and partition if desired) the
drive.

If you bought a bare drive OEM with no utility disk, you can usually
download them from the manufactuer website and transfer to CD.

I found that with my SATA drives, Windows XP did not recognize the drives
until they were properly formatted.

Good Luck,
Fitz

 

[Andy]

Sounds like you have the blue and red connectors mixed up.
My guess is it is unlikely that the motherboard can boot from a CD
drive on the red IDE connector. And Windows XP setup will not be able
to see a hard drive on the red IDE connector without a device driver
for the ITE controller.