Help with installing Windows on SATA drive?

Question

What started as a simple problem with my DVD-ROM started a chain of events that eventually led me to format my hard drive. It's a SATA hard drive and I'm using a GA-K8N Pro-SLI mobo by Gigabyte. I'd like to think of myself as a fairly computer savvy person (I built this pc and got it to work initially), but something seems to be wrong this time around.

I've made floppies containing the SATA drivers (at least I think they're the drivers, the mobo's CD doesn't have a makedisk.exe, so I simply copied the files from the SATARAID folder onto the floppy), and after I load them and Windows begins installing files, everything goes smooth until the first "Setup is starting Windows..." and then bam, blue screen error.

The error says to check for viruses on my computer, remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers, check the hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated, and to run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, then restart.

There is no blue screen error if I don't try to install the drivers. The Windows installation continues flawlessly up until the first restart, but then simply boots from the Windows cd again rather than what it installed on the hard drive.

The problem is not the boot order. It's an issue of recognizing the hard drive itself.

Using RAID because, as far as I can tell, it's my only option when using a SATA drive. If it isn't, feel free to enlighten me as to what I'm doing wrong. How can I get the drive working and recognized?

Answer 1

did you re-enter your BIOS so that way you can change how it boots and not from cd?

Answer 2

Why are you trying to use a raid? you only have a single hard drive.

Oh,and it doesnt matter whether or not you have it set to boot the cd first.

Answer 3

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/sata_install_tshoot.html