As a favour to my father in-law, I offered to sort out his ailing PC. Taking the belt and braces option I purchased a new SATA HDD, with the intention of installing a clean copy of XP and then all the other software. Once this was up and running then I would take the old SATA drive and place it in the external drive casing and move the required files across.
I unplugged the old Seagate SATA drive, plugged in the new one and attempted to install XP...this is where my problems begin.
XP install starts up from the CD and gets as far as telling me that it is unable to detect hard disk drives installed on this pc. I have been unable to get past and my patience are wearing thin and I am losing the will to live. Enough of the fluff...some important details...
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Motherboard - gigabyte k8 triton series ga k8n pro
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New Harddrive - seagate barracuda 7200.10 160gb (SATA)
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Selective BIOS setting...
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STANDARD CMOS FEATURES
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1)IDE HDD Auto - detection - AUTO
a)IDE Primary = Auto
b)Access Mode = Auto
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ADVANCED BIOS FEATURES
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1)SCSI/RAID Cntrl BOOT ORDER
a) ITE RAID CONTROLLER
b) SOILICON IMAGE MASS STORAGE CONTROLLER
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INTERGRATED PERIPHERALS
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1)ONBOARD SERIAL ATA = enabled
20SERIAL ATA FUNCTION = base
3)ONBOARD GIGA-RAID = enabled
4)GIGA RAID FUNCTION = ata
So far I have fiddled with some of the BIOS settings. When the PC boots up and it performs a check to detect IDE drives (not sure of this) then it seems to see new drive, in the sense that it displays the size on the screen. Even when I plug the old drive back in, the BIOS still does not see the original drive...but it still works and XP is still operational...phew.
I have an external case and plugged the new drive and formatted a 60gb active primary partition and my laptop can see and write to this when plugged in via USB.
After reading some postings, I realized that I needed to hit F6 when the XP install starts up. I found the 'driver' files on the CD and copied them to a 3.5" floppy. There are 2 XP options to select from and when I select either then I still do not progress any further. I have not updated the BIOS as I'm sure if this will kill the PC off. At present they can still use email and internet. After 2 days...it is if I have not touched it apart from a few changes to the BIOS.
Many postings detail issues with SATA HDD and now they have claimed me as another victim...but hopefully only temporary...
