Sata installation help needed

[misterjingo]

Hi all,

I've got a 'GA-K8NMF-9 nForce4-4X chipset' motherboard and I have just purchased a 'Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB 3200KS SATA-II 16MB Cache' harddisc.
I've never used a sata drive before, and i'm trying to install winxp pro to it. I want the computer to boot from it, but it doesn't seem to see it at boot time. During XP setup, the drive can be seen, formatted and files copied to. But when it reboots to complete the install, it simply doesn't see the drive.
I've tried installing the 'nVidia Series ATA(XP)' drivers during the win setup, but it still does no good.
The motherboard bios has no option to boot from sata. THe drive seems to be ok, because if I plug in the old IDE cable drive and load windows, the sata drive can be seen in the directory listing etc.

Any ideas what i'm doing wrong or what I should do?

I did try setting up JBOD Raid and making it bootable, but this did allow windows to be installed, but on its first start up I got an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error.

Chris

 

[misterjingo]

Set it to SCSI.

Just make sure you don't have raid enabled in the BIOS if your not using it.

I'm not sure what that mobo has on it, but if it has Silicon Image sata (and your using them), you'll need to install drivers as well

There isn't a scsi option in the bios either

Mates got this board, with SATA drive...same problem, until RAID is disabled and now managed to install XP onto the SATA drive. I should have more info within 1 hour, but pretty sure just RAID disable sorted it. Like you said installing to PATA and using the SATA as D: drive sees the SATA fine, but cannot install.

Disabling RAID lets windows boot, but I get the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_Volume BSOD when the windows logo appears. I did partician the HDD, but surely this wouldn't cause it to be unmountable?

 

[misterjingo]

Finally solved it, and it was a bit of a nightmare. The problem was that the nVidia sata drivers are not signed, so even though they allow you to install the setup files to the hd (pressing F6 during setup to include them), on the final stage of installation, windows uses its own drivers which are not compatible with the mobo. This causes a blue screen on start-up after installation.

The solution was to use a utility to rebuild the win iso, integerate the nVidia sata drivers into it, and then burn it to a cd. Then install from this modified iso which contains the correct drivers.

Only took half a day to solve it