ian_737

Hey everyone - I've jst bought a PC that didnt have a hard drive, I had two so I thought I could use them on the new PC.

When I opened it up I noticed that the new PC has SATA cables and not the conventional (old) way of connecting my HD (lots of pins).

So... I bought a converter card.... plugged it in, hooked up my sata cable and my other cable... formatted my hard drives on another PC for a fresh install and away I went.

Now, I turned on my new computer and in the loading section I noticed that the two HDs were recognised, master and slave so all was okay. I changed my BIOS to boot from CD so that I could boot from my winXP startup disk and it all starts normally.... up until this point.....

I go to install windows and I get to the blue screen section where it asks which hard drive do I want to install windows on... here, there are 4 subheadings but it doesnt see my two hard drives, therefore I cant install windows as the computer now thinks it doesnt have any hard drives.

I've tried messing with the master/slave sleeves but got no luck, I also booted my motherboard CD and made a RAID diskette for F6 installation but none of this has worked.

Anyone have any clues?

I'm trying to install windows Home XP on a ASROCK AM1NF6G-VSTA motherboard

The IDE (i think thats what you call the old style hard drives!!) to SATA converter is labeled as 2 Port serial ATA PCI host card

Many thanks, I'd really appreciate some help here!!

ian_737

Plleeease any ideas?

smz

This is an easy one. Give me the Brand and part number of the sata card you bought. Sounds like you need the "preinstall" sata driver sometimes known as AHCI or even a fake raid driver. Now I have a USB floppy so it's cake, but if you don't, someone in here will probably give you a suggestion on how to do this with maybe a flash drive?

I will look up the card info for you and give you a link to download the file or create a floppy maker image for you and give you a link to my web server. Then you just run the EXE file, put a blank floppy in and it takes care of the rest upon execution.

When you boot off the CD, you will see for about 5 seconds a message saying "please press any key to boot from CD" you need to do that and watch for a message on the bottom of the screen saying to press F6 to specify storage drivers. Hold it down for a few seconds and during your install when it goes to examine the available space and drivers, it will ask you if you want to specify an additional controller. You type the letter "S" to specify and it will ask you to insert the Storage adapters disc.

On a side note, you mentioned formatting the drives on another machine. Sometimes that can cause more harm then good because every once in a while one computer bios can detect the drive with different parameters then another same goes with the 3rd party controller card. There's always a chance you may need to boot to dos or a partition program and fdisk the drive(s) delete any partition (probably says non-dos) then recreate the partition. Doesn't matter what format if Fat32 is your only choice. You can change it after the fact.

If you have no idea where to find the makers of the card's name and/or part number. Take a look at the front of the card and look for the largest chip. It will have some small lettering more than likely saying VIA, SIS, or something of that sort. Then a number associated with the chip. If that's the case, you may just need a generic chipset preinstall driver. Your windows install will then detect the presence of your drives if the driver is correct.

Let us know your findings. Everest isn't an option at this time since you aren't even in windows.

Smz

ziggly

how do i know what kind of sata controller do i have. its a vostro 200 by dell