SATA Drive detection

[newbie2181]

Hi,
I am trying to install windows Xp on a machine with a sata hard drive. If i just let the installation run through it says it can't find any hdd's and aborts the installation. I have tried installing the drivers for the sata controller after pressing F6 at the start of the installation but i just get the following error message

file\winxp\ulsata.sys caused an unexpected error (18) at line 2108 in d:\xpclient\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.

any help here would be excellent

cheers

dan

 

[WillShakespeare]

How are you trying to load the drivers for the SATA controller? Do you get as far as it asking for the floppy?

Will

 

[newbie2181]

Yeah i do, It asks for the floppy seems to read a bit of info off it. Then it says its gonna install drivers for the controller hit enter to continue then it carries on loading the rest of the installation temp files. then says that it can't find a HDD to install windows on your machine will restart in 15 seconds?!!

I was debateing flashing the bios but i really can't see how that would solve anything because it seems to be more of a windows problem?

Cheers

Dan

 

[WillShakespeare]

Hmmm... I had this trouble, and ended up downloading some generic SATA RAID drivers from the Internet... trouble is i can't remember the site I got them from, nor have I been able to serach and find them again (I have looked...). you might try searching in the meantime for such drivers. It is possible you might be using drivers that the WIndows installation OS can't use properly... That was what my problem was... I was using the XP drivers on the disk with the MoBo, but the install routine was using a Windows 98 variation of DOS for the installation, or something like that. Thing is I was doing it for a friends machine and so I only spent a couple of days on it last year and so I can't remember evrything I did... but maybe this is something to go on... The other problem could be the driver files you have could be corrupt...

hth,

Will

 

[newbie2181]

Cheers for that,

I am baffled now because i wacked a standard ATA hard drive in there as well and the WinXP setup went through fine without any problems and even let me install to the SATA drive!!?!?!

It will also let me boot to the SATA drive as long as the ATA drive is in and its working as a dual boot system. As soon as i unplug the ATA drive i can no longer boot the machine.

This has left me thinking that the reason for all this is the setup in the bios. So i read the 1 page of info i got in the motherboard manual about changing the bios settings but i didn't make any sense. Its a MSI 865G Neo 2 board

Cheers again

Dan

 

[kjv1611]

Definitely Bios, it seems - or jumper settings on the SATA drive? Seems it would be the same as with standard ATA drives. If can't fix there, try the MSI support website or possibly

http://www.tomshardware.com

or

http://www.anandtech.com

for issues. You could also try contacting Maximum PC Magazine, as they seem to respond to problems of this sort when people ask. Visit at

http://www.maximumpc.com

if you don't already get the magazine.