After building a rig I went ahead and started up the XP installation. Nearing the end of this installation, it fails due to not having the right drivers for my hard disk. I have tried all the drivers I could find, but none will work. At the beginning of XP installation it says to press F6 to install third party raid and SCSI drivers - this is what I do. I only have one SATA drive in the PC. That's a Seagate st3250824as 250Gb. P5LD2-Deluxe mobo. I was up all night trying to work this out, should probably have asked you guys sooner
check this hope it helps BTW: you still feeling dead Edit: is it a new mobo ? what is the BIOS date ?
I'm feeling very dead unfortunately. BIOS detects the harddrive, but windows installation fails. No matter what drivers I put on a floppy disk (I've tried about 4 different ones), the setup doesn't read it. Could it be a problem with the floppy drive? It doesnt appear in BIOS (not sure if it should). And the floppy disk works in my Sony Vaio - where I removed it from. Thanks donkey42, but my HDD is SATA, not ATA. The troubleshooting in SATA tells me to do what I have been doing - to no success. Has anyone tried this and been successful? My PC specs are as follows: Intel Pentium D 805 ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe 1024MB DDR2 RAM @ 667MHz Seagate Barracude 250Gb 7200RPM
Okay, the floppy disk drive wasnt working properly as i had originally thought. I now have it working. When installing windows it finds the driver on A and I can install it. But at the end of this installation 'starting windows' or something - i get the same error message. About my hard disk possibly being corrupted etc. I am now running a complete secure format of the drive.
One thing that can interfere with installation on a disk is if the controller is set to RAID mode. If that's the case, you'll need to provide the RAID driver or set the SATA controller in a non-RAID mode. You can do this within the motherboard BIOS, and if you have a SATA card with RAID, you can configure it there. If you're using a floppy that came with your SATA drive, that's not going to solve the problem. It's to do with the controller. If it's set in RAID mode, Windows will require a driver. If it's not, then we need to look elsewhere, as the system sees it just like another hard drive. The SATA interface itself isn't the problem.
I had never set up a SATA drive before and didn't know that Windows would not recognize it. Part of the problem was the floppy drive, which was malfunctioning for some reason. I took a certain driver off the CD provided by ASUS (nothing of this mentioned in the manual), but somebody on ebuyer.co.uk commented telling what to do. All is fine now. Thanks for the help.
