October 13, 2008 02:19pm pdt

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	[x] Attachment Details

BIOS will not recognize SATA-II HDD, but Windows will install??

[x]

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7.0

Zones: Computer Hard Drives, Hard Drives & Storage, Computer Motherboards

Tags: Microsoft, Windows XP Pro, 32-bit, SP2, Installed 3rd party SATA-II drivers with motherboard, ASUS, nForce 500 SLI motherboard, M2N-E SLI, Motherboard

I'm trying to set up a new machine with the following components:
Mobo: ASUS M2N-E SLI (SATA-II with on-board RAID 0, 0+1, 5, and 1+0 support)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+
RAM: mushkin 2GB (2 x 1GB) 5-5-5-12
HDD: Western Digital 250GB SATA-II (WD2500AAJS) (single drive, no RAID)
Video: XFX GeForce 8400GS 512MB
Optical: Lite on it 48x/24x/48x CDRW, Pioneer DVD-ROM (don't have exact specs handy)
Floppy drive
Power: Cooler Master eXtreme power 500W
OS: Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP2

I'm having a strange problem with the BIOS not recognizing the Hard Drive.

On a cold boot (when the machine has been off for 10-20 minutes) I enter the BIOS, and the hard drive is recognized, but when I try to install Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP2, I get a message that no hard drive can be found. The hard drive is also no longer seen in the BIOS.

Booting off of the CD provided with the motherboard, I created a floppy disk which has the SATA drivers on it (there's a utility on the CD specifically made to do this). Again booting off of the Windows XP Pro CD, I press "F6" when prompted to do so, and load the SATA drivers off of the floppy disk.

It appears that the drive can now be formatted and the Windows XP installation goes (seemingly) smoothly (I can actually hear the drive working, so it is not a faulty drive). However, when the system reboots, I am getting a message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER", and the BIOS still does not recognize the hard drive.

I have no manual setting in my BIOS to 'force' a hard drive detection, only 'Auto'.

The most puzzling things to me are that:
- The HDD is detected by the BIOS on a cold boot but not after the system tries to boot off of the HDD.
- I can format the drive and install Windows using the drivers provided, but then the BIOS won't let me boot off the HDD.

All the drive connections are OK because I can access the drive when installing Windows. I have tried all 4 SATA ports, and tried switching the boot order for the different drives.

I'm completely stumped at this point.

Thanks in advance.

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