So, I got the new parts for my new tower in yesterday, got them all put together and after a lot of head scratching and frustration, I realized I forgot to plug the ATX 12v into the power supply. Anyway, it turned on went through BIOS, and got into the Windows installer.

It sat at the first screen with just the wallpaper on it for a bit, then asked me for my language choices. Went through that just fine, until a random screen pops up and tells me something along the lines of "This installer needs missing CD/DVD drivers..."

After much googling, and surfing the internet I found that this is a fairly common problem, and no one really has any insight into fixing it, except a providing it with the proper drivers, which I would do if I knew which ones to feed it. I gave it some, which were definitely the wrong ones, but it let the install complete and even go into windows, where I then had no DVD/CD Drive show up, Internet didn't work, and the Video Card drivers were all wahcked out, and then it proceeded to lock me out of windows for not activating, which doesn't make a lot of sense considering it was installed for about a whole 5 minutes before I rebooted.

Anyway, Has anyone else had this problem, or know how to fix it?

I've heard I need to give it the IDE ATA/ATAPI drivers, but I can't find them on the discs that came with my computer as nothing is labeled with a name of what it is.

Heres the specs, just incase they are needed:
Gigabyte EP45-DS3L
Intel e8400
ATI HD 4870
4gb Corair XMS2
NEC DVD-RW [IDE]
250gb Seagate [SATA]

Check the driver disk for your motherboard for the ATAPI/IDE drivers. Then repeat whatever you did to install the drivers the first time.

As for the activation error make sure the date in BIOS is set properly---that's about the only thing I can think of that would cause it to go into lockdown mode like that.

I checked the Motherboard CD, but no luck. None of them are named in any sort of pattern to discern what they are. Theres a big list of drivers, and I'm sure one of them is the one it wants, but I cant seem to figure out which one is the actual ATA/ATAPI driver.

I thought about the BIOS, figured I'll check that today. I'm going to keep plugging away at it, may just install XP, then upgrade it to Vista.

If you can't tell which one it is install all of them.

Alternately, use another machine to figure out which driver is the CD/DVD driver. Start to install one driver, and if it's not the one you're after (as in it says, "Click OK to install your videocard drivers...") just cancel out and try the next one.

My Toshiba laptop came with a "restore CD" of sorts, but all the drivers were not easily named. If I had an issue, instead of doing a full restore, just pop in the CD and use my pre-figured list to select the driver I want to re-install...

Good luck