SATA problem, mobo detects it, but won't boot.

[C:\Kidderz\]

Hey, I've just built a PC for a friend.

The specs are:

AMD 3200+ 400FSB
120GB WD SATA HDD
Gigabyte GA-7N400 PRO 2 (On SATA 0)
NEC DVD-RW (On IDE Primary Master)
3.5 FDD

Right, when I start up, the SATA controller detects the hard drive.

But when I place my XP disc in to install it, it says BOOT FROM CD... then skips it, and then the FDD trys to read a disk. Then something like BOOT DISK ERROR, PRESS ENTER TO RETRY.

I've tried playing with the BIOS settings, everything. And it still happens.

Have I set anything up wrong? Or is the motherboard trying to find a hard drive, but failing?

...I wish I had the manual for SATA/Mobo, but someone had to bin it by accident...

[Davis]

sigh... there is a search feature for this.

fine. go into your bios and set your boot order to cd-rom 1st. pop your xp disk in and press a key when you see the prompt "press any key to boot from cd-rom"
Now make sure you have your hard drives current drivers on a floppy.

as soon as you see the blue install screen pop up, follow the instructions and pop in your driver floppy when prompted. once your hdd drivers are installed you can continue normally.

your problem seems to be you're not pressing a key when it tells you to "press a key to boot from cd-rom" so you're not initalizing the boot install.

[C:\Kidderz\]

I do press a key, The little .'s when it's booting the CD don't even appear... Nowt happens. I can hear the CD-ROM fire up, but it just skips it.

I might just make up a boot floppy and install from command prompt instead, if possible.

[Davis]

do you have more then 1 cd-rom? Is the 1st boot device cd-rom in the boot order? Try serring the 1st to cd-rom, and then disable the other boot options.

easiest way is to install by cd-rom. im not sure if you can install xp by a floppy.(dont think so)

[Addict]

its f6, it will ask you if there are any other drivers you may need for a storage devise, then it will go through all the steps and after that it will pop open the window for you to select the drivers

[fripple]

f6 is just to install the serial drivers.. not got that far yet!

[C:\Kidderz\]

Nah, just the one optical drive. I'll borrow someone else's XP disc, just incase this one is a dud... but I've already tried two so far.

I might take along my junker CD-ROM drive and see what that one does.

[Addict]

ooo, so he has a sata optical drive, didnt really think about that, just assumed it was hd

sry ^^

[Taylor]

Check to see if your bios has reckonised your hard drive if not you will need a bios upgrade. Have you got the jupper set to primary master. If the bios can see your hard drive have you partioned and formated it. Windows will propt you to format if not. Have you set the boot order set 1st boot device to cd-rom. You could also boot from a start up disk into dos and change to the cd-rom directory usulaly R: and then run setup.exe good luck

Taylor

[Blackice]

Download the XP boot disks.

never heard of an SATA cd-rom.. Usually it has to be ATAPI compatible to boot from a CD I thought.