Help with installing a SATA hard drive please

[panessa13]

I am working on a new build with the following specs:

Power Supply: Thermaltake ATX 430W
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro SLI S.939
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 4000+
Hard Drive: Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Memory: SUPER TALENT 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)

The whole system boots up properly and the hard drive is listed in the BIOS. Since this is my first time working with a SATA drive, I didn't realize that I would need a floppy disc with the motherboard drivers for SATA to install Windows XP. I ran the setup without the disc and the hard drive was recognized and formatted, but when the computer was restarted the same setup step would run again.

After looking up SATA hard drive installation online, I made the floppy disk with the motherboard drivers and ran my Windows XP setup. This time I hit F6 to install the extra drivers and selected the "NVIDIA NForce Storage Controller" and the "NVIDIA RAID CLASS DRIVER". Then setup finishes installing its drivers, and asks me if I want to do a new install or a repair of Windows XP. I select new install, and the next screen that comes up says that a hard drive can't be found.

I'm stuck on what to do after this point. If I don't install the drivers on the floppy disk, the first portion of Windows setup run successfully and detect my hard drive, but I can't get to the next setup step. If I do install the drivers on the floppy disk, setup can't detect my hard drive. Any advice on what I should try to get XP installed?

[glc]

You do not need to use the driver disk to install on SATA with that chipset unless you are using RAID. After the initial setup, when it reboots, go into the bios and remove the optical drive from the boot order.

[panessa13]

Thanks for your help. I tried doing this by letting the first part of the setup run through. When the computer rebooted I went into the BIOS right away and set my first boot device to my hard drive and disabled my second and third boot device. I saved and let the computer continue to boot up, but it still booted from the cd-rom drive and went through the same setup steps again.

[LeftyAce]

It's kind of odd that you can't get the CD out of the boot order, but here's a possible way around it. Just eject the cd as the computer reboots after the install process.

You may need to insert it again once the computer is on, but if so windows will prompt you and wait.