Im building my new rig with an Abit NF7-S mobo and ans seagate 80gig sata HD. I ran the format disk that came with the drive and got it formatted, but xp won't recognize the drive when it tries to install. I checked around and people been sayin you need to hit f6 or whatever when the xp install loads up to load scsi drivers, and then load up sata drivers from a floppy instead, so I get the satadriver disk from Abit's website with the all the drivers on it, but when windows says instert the driver disk, I put it in and it checks for the drivers, but then the same screen pops up again sayin the same thing like it couldn't find the drivers. I tried a new floppy, and even a new floppy drive but the same thing keeps happening . Any help would be really appreciated. THANKS!!!!

Make sure the floppy drive controller and the Sata Sil3112a chip is enabled in bios and Drive A is set to 3.5" 1.44MB.

Also make sure that you when you download the driver file, unzip it to desktop then navigate to the "silicon" folder, then "3112" sub-folder. Copy the contents of the 3112 folder to a freshly formatted floppy disk. Do not copy the folder itself, just its contents.

Try loading it in WinXP Setup again, it will work.

Edit: After further investigation, I found that the drivers abit provides are the SATARAID drivers, and unless you are running multiple hard drives in raid on the SATA controller you will not be able to boot.

Please use the standard non-raid 3112a drivers from SIlicon Image themselves. Available Here. Simply unzip to A:\

Hard to say what the problem could be... Ive never seen this happen before. How did you format? Im hoping you didnt zero out the drive (low level format). Theres a chance you could ruin the drive by doing this.

Does the drive come up in the POST screen? It could also be a BIOS setting. Make sure you have SATA enabled.

I can only think of a few low-brow ways to troubleshoot this drive:

throw it in another machine and see if the machine recognizes it. If you dont see it in My Computer, go into start>all programs>administrative tools>computer management>disk management. You should see the drive in the list at the bottom right whether it is formatted or not. If you do not see it, its a good possibility the drive is bad.

If it does see the drive, format it as NTFS from that computer's OS and then install it into your new pc.

You could also try formatting it from a DOS boot using FDISK.

Sorry I cant give you much more than that... Im not a big fan of Seagates anyways. Ive seen more than my share of them die and even had one tech tell me "yeah hit it on the top and itll start working again"... not good.

Hope this helps.

SATA Requires controller drivers and a low lever format (or format in winxp setup) to be recongized in windows so he cannot simply throw the drive in another machine.

Also, most SATA drives don't show up during post, mine
doesnt, but it boots straight to xp after post all the same.

Well i tried reformatting with fdisk, copying the drivers from jusr that one folder, checked all BIOS settings (the drive shows up in the RAID utility that automatically boots wit the mobo), didnt work. Well after a long period of pondering, I made sure all the connections werent loose, and checked again, but it didnt work. So I decided to change the SATA cable, but that didnt work either. Then I changed the floppy cable and BINGO, that was it.
Something so small and stupid as a bad floppy cable had me formatting and changing all my settings and this that and the other, when all it was is a stupid mother f***ing piece of s**t floppy cable. *HUGE SIGH* well, at least its fixed. Thanks again for the help guys (10 minute response in a forum, thats gotta be a record lol)

In a situation like that you don't know whether to be pissed off or jump for joy.

let me tell ya i got a sata drive in my comp right now and it boots everytime and i didnt even have to mess with a floppy drive

of course its booting suse, redhat, and freebsd