Ok, so I bought me a 250 gig SATA maxtor drive with the 16mb of cache. Not a bad upgrade from my ide 60 gigger eh?

Well, being that I havn't used a floppy drive in a few years and I don't own a spare; I rip the floppy out of my wifes HP. No biggie, her and the kid took a vacation with my folks to Disney World so I don't have to hear the griping (I gotta pay the bills).

Well, SNAFU #1. I am guessing my floppy controller is dead, because I can't get that darn thing to work for anything. I know the floppy works, but it sure as heck won't work in my system. I even loaded the fail safes from bios, still no joy.

So I figure I will just make one of those fancy slipstreamed WinXp cds. I find a guide and go through the inclusion of service pack 2 (serisous PITA). Then I make the dirs for the drivers, throw them in, and edit the txtsetup.sif. Guide tells me to find [hardwareldsdatabase].
SNAFU #2. The above string does not exist in my file.

So now, how the heck do I install this spankin new HDD as my primary (and only) HDD?

AMD XP3000+
Abit NF7-S v2

hmm sounds like you have done the same thing that i have done, i have turned off the FDC in the bios and not selcted anything in the primary BIOS screen where you set the time and date, if you go into intergrated per.. and enable the controller, and then go into the above screen and srtup a floppy it should work, are you geting any errors messages? about the floppy drive not being there?

I'm only suggesting this because its something so simple you might have overlooked it.

Have you tried turning the floppy cable upside down?

LOL, I have done that many times..

Ok, well I got the floppy working, yet we still have a problem.

It loaded the drivers, formated the drive, loaded files but when it rebooted it still didn't recognized the drive.

It went through the whole setup phase again.

Rinse, wash and repeat. I am frustrated beyond all means at this point.

What am I missing?

do you have the jumpers set?

and do you have it set to boot from SATA?

I will double check all of the jumpers. It was the only drive in the system when I tried though.

As far as the boot sequence, when I set it to boot from SATA it didn't find anything, gave me a boot error. When I set the cd rom as secondary then it would go straight to a new install of windows as if all the crap I had just done didn't happen.

Quote: Originally Posted by Caspertg I will double check all of the jumpers. It was the only drive in the system when I tried though. As far as the boot sequence, when I set it to boot from SATA it didn't find anything, gave me a boot error. When I set the cd rom as secondary then it would go straight to a new install of windows as if all the crap I had just done didn't happen.

Make sure the SATA Controller is enabled in BIOS, its usually hidden in a completely different heading than boot sequence.

On the bright side, you've been saved the grief of buying a sata drive and having to rma it three times over before getting a drive that doesn't die within 30 days.

Quote: Originally Posted by cpjlam On the bright side, you've been saved the grief of buying a sata drive and having to rma it three times over before getting a drive that doesn't die within 30 days.

What brand and model is that? Sounds simmilar to one of those IBM Deathstars.

Quote: Originally Posted by YohanSpritz What brand and model is that? Sounds simmilar to one of those IBM Deathstars.

Seagate 300GB ST3300831AS

Casper, got some thing to run by ya . . . If you still have your other drive usable, you need to install Maxblast and have it set up the SATA drive to be your boot drive .. .

I ran into the exact issue . . . and the only thing I can figure is because it's being setup by the system initially as a tertiary drive, it has no native MBR . . . So, Maxblast sets up the MBR and copies over the existing boot drive . . .

kinda a pain in the butt, but you can always just do the boot from windows cd to format that and have it work.

Now, if you don't have the other drive available to install maxblast from, I think they have a CD bootable version, or a floppy version.

Let me know if this works out for ya.

Edit: and if you can translate that with no help, I'll be suprised. . . Kinda ran it all together in my head and that's how it dumped onto the keyboard.

2nd edit: I see in another post you have solved it, but I'm leaving this up for anyone else that it may help.

o_O
I just plugged my SATA drive in... BIOS and windows found it no problem...