Drives not being recognized during boot

[Turkman]

I have just installed two Seagate SATA drive in a new build. When I boot up the drives are listed in the BIOS but as it continues to boot it doesn't recognize the drives. If I take the hard drives out of the boot sequence, it will then continue to the CD-ROM and is looking for the boot disk.

At this point I'm doing an initial boot from an XP Pro Upgrade disk. If I continue to try and set up Windows, eventually the setup fails because it's looing for the hard drives.

I can't tell if the hard drives are powered up but the front panel light does not illuminate during boot. I checked the power attachement to the drives but I don't see a problem with that.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks...

[RJ]

You need to change the boot order. First boot device should be the CD-ROM, then the hard drive. That way you can boot from the CD.
If the CD is after the hard drive in the boot order, the boot process will terminate with an error and the CD-ROM won't be checked at all.

RJ

[Turkman]

RJ...I have tried that and have continued through the boot to the CD. As I continue to install Windows though, eventually it gives me a message it can't find the hard drives and terminates the setup.

[glc]

Are you pressing F6 when prompted to install a 3rd party controller driver? You need to do this, then put the SATA driver floppy in.

[damocell]

you need to get a raid floopy, i got mine from my motherboard supplier, you need to press F6 when prompted at the first blue screen you get when trying to install XP, as it doesnt detect sata hard drives in windows. also if you don't then get a sata fix programme then the cache isn't cleared when you close windows and after a week or so your hard drive will start to loose files, (got my fix programme today), microsoft know of the problem and are fixing it, it should be available soon in service pack 2, there is a SP2 beta version available in limited numbers at the mo, but wouldn't trust it as it is a beta version,
hope this helped, i had the same prob and was stumped!
i have the file you need for my asus via 600 chipset motherboard, if you are running an asus board, with this chipset let me know and i will email it you
damocell

[Turkman]

I do have the RAID disk that came with the mobo. When I set the BIOS to the RAID config and reboot I am able to set up a RAID config with CNTL-I. I am trying to set up a RAID 1 though. All goes good to this point.

As I try to setup Windows from the disk, it gives me the opportunity to hit F6 but it doesn't go immediately to the floppy. At some point it will not detect drives and asks me for the disk for the RAID driver and loads it.

As it continues through setup it doesn't detect the drives and terminates setup.

I reconfigured without RAID and I was able to load Windows no problem. Without RAID it detects the primary drive to write to.

Thanks for the offer but I'm using an Intel board.

[glc]

Intel boards with SATA RAID controllers come with a floppy, this is the one you have to use. When you hit F6, it won't prompt you right away, it takes another minute or so of work before it stops and prompts you, follow the prompts. If you don't have the floppy, you should be able to download the appropriate files from the Intel support site and make the floppy.