new system, but can't install w/ a SATA drive... help please

[zskillz]

Hey all, I have a new system that I put together yesterday. However, I'm having a few problems.

As far as I can tell, all of the hardware is working great. I have

abit NF7-S mobo
hitachi 80GB SATA drive
512 333 corsair ram


I can boot, post, and have no problems. The SATA drive is recognized. I have 2 problems though.

1) When I boot with a floppy, and fdisk, it only sees the drive as having 12GB (or something close to that).... I just partitioned off and formated 5GB of that fo the OS (as I normally do)., then after format, I can access the drive with no problems at all... so hmmm...

2) when I boot with the windowsXPpro CD, everything seems to be going along fine until I get to the option to "install XP press ENTER". At that point, it says that no drives are found to install to and press F3 to reboot the system.


now I have tried just about anything that I can think of to get this too work. I have upgraded the BIOS to the most recent revision and everything, but I am at a total loss and I think that it's got to be the SATA thing.

can anyone please help me? ? I'm dying to mess around with this thing!!

-Z

[Shawn711]

You have to hit F6 when it asks if you have to install a 3rd party SCSI controller and then install SATA controller drivers from a floppy drive to install Windows to a SATA drive. I believe that would be the problem. Hope this solves the problem.

Shawn

[zskillz]

shawn, at what point am I supposed to be hitting F6?

see... I had the SATA drivers on the floppy, and I watching for some sort of prompt, but apparently I totally missed it. I presume this will be sometime around when the SATA BIOS (for lack of a better way to describe it) screen appears. (which is directly after the normal POST)

-Z

[The Real Bingo]

The Windows setup will ask you if you have to install a 3rd party thing like shawn said. You will see it on the bottom of the screen. Just press F6 when it says. Your hard drive did come with a floppy, right?

[zskillz]

yeah.. it came with a floppy...

but I'm really not remembering the windows install prompting me for drivers... I'll take another look.

-Z

[stroyal]

It is in the beginning of setup ( first of the blue screen). You only get 2 seconds so be ready.
It does nothing at that time, but will ask for a disk during instalation, but only if you hit f6 in the beginning

[zskillz]

haha
great
ok..i'll watch
thanks all
-Z