XP does not recognize SATA HDD

[Ray]

Hi there, I just wonder if anyone can assist with my SATA
blues.

Whenever I attempt to install XP I receive a prompt
stating "XP can not locate a hard drive and cannot
continue".

Here's my hardware:
Seagate 80GB SATA drive (only drive n the system)
Kingston 512 MB DDR
NEC DVD (connected to Secondary IDE controller) all other
IDE controller slots are empty.
MSI K7N2Delta Motherboard (MS-6570 with newest Bios)
MSI uses a promise 376/378 SATA controller
OS = XP home

I have already flashed with the newest Bios
Installed the HDD using the Seagate disk wizard
(successful)
Established a single drive raid (for some reason you must
establish some form of raid or the drive will not be
usable).
Note: the CMOS doesn't list SATA as a possible
boot option
I booted the system with the XP CD
Selected F6 and installed the supplied driver and the
newest one from the web site as well.
Windows does the initial install, prompts that windows
will now start however, when it gets to the next screen
where I should identify drives and partitions info. I
receive the error: no hard drive found.

Does anyone have this problem or even better, CAN YOU
HELP, PLS!!!

 

[Bob Harris]

The good news is that SATA really can work with XP. I
have two SATA 120 Gig Seagate disks on an ASUS P4S8X
motherboard. They are in separate RAID arrays, one disk
each. I boot from one and the other is for backups and
scratch space for processing video images.

Anyway, you are doing almost everything right, but here
are a couple of things to try:

1. Get the SeaTools diagnostic utilties from Seagate and
place on a floppy. Run them and see whether they see the
disk. If they do, and I assume they probably will, run
the short diagnostic (30-90 sec). If it says the disk is
OK, it probably is really is OK, and it is connectd
properly. If not disk seen, check wires.

2. In the BIOS look for a boot option something like the
following:

Other boot device: SCSI/Onboard ATA Boot

That is the designation my ASUS motherboard uses to say
that the boot should be from the SATA controller. My SATA
is RAID, not SCSI, but for some reason they all seem to be
lumped together, as distinct from IDE disks.

Also, if there is a BIOS option for boot from IDE hard
drive, be sure that it says NO, NONE, or whaever implies
do not try it in your BIOS.

3. Look into the details of the driver installation that
you did early in the XP setup, just after pressing F6. My
first try was to put the drivers on a floppy. That
failed. After reading the README.TXT file that came from
ASUS in the download, I found that I also needed some file
called "TEXTSTUP.OEM" in the root level of the floppy.
the drivers remained in a subdirectory called winxp.