Problems installing to SATA drive

[Paul J. Hurley]

I have a brand new Western Digital 120GB SATA drive. I have it installed
to a MSI 865PE Neo2 mobo, and I'm trying to install WinXP Pro. (On this
mobo I have an older IDE drive booting and running XP quite happily, but I
disable this drive in the BIOS for the installation.) When I boot from a
floppy and install XP from the CD, the DOS portion of the install (file
copy, etc.) completes properly -- I don't have to install a special driver,
or so it appears. The problem occurs when the XP install wants to boot
after the file copy, when I get a missing boot record error. I'm pretty
sure I have the BIOS settings correct since the SATA drive is recognized
and the system does try to boot from it.

To try to get as simple a case as possible, I booted to DOS from a Win98
recovery floppy and formatted the SATA drive with the copy system files
option. When I tried to boot from the SATA drive I got a "missing
operating system" error.

I've kind of hit a wall here, since everything else appears to be OK.

Suggestions?

Thanks
Paul

 

[Rob]

you need to hit F6 when prompted during install during the textmode setup
when it asks if you need to install mass storage drivers and have the SATA
drivers on a floppy. XP has no drivers for SATA and has no idea what to do
with a SATA drive. in fact it doesn't even know it exists once it hits GUI
setup unless you've loaded the drivers during textmode.

 

[Rich Barry]

Paul, try physically disconnecting the IDE hard drive. Set cdrom as first
boot device in Bios. Boot from CD.

 

[Paul J. Hurley]

Thanks for the tip Rich and Rob. I did both: physically disconnect the IDE
devices I do not need _and_ have the SATA drivers on floppy for F6.
Everything now boots and loads properly.

Paul