building system with SATA drive...help! Resolved

[Gravity]

I have a brand new system that I'm building for a research geek friend of mine. I promised it would be fast but I can't get XP to recognize the SATA drive for install. I'm using a Seagate barracuda SATA drive and a gigabyte K7Triton MB. I can get through post and load the XP setup but it says it can't find the drive so it has to cancel installation.

Gigabyte says to download their manual for SATA installation but I can't find the thing anywhere. Also, I tried to run the seagate utility but I can't get to a dos prompt to run it for format.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Gravity

Edit: So, my conclusion is that I cannot run this SATA setup without 2 drives in some sore ot Raid configuration. That's the obvious mistake. So, I installed the OS onto an old 13 gig drive I had in a box and ran the MB raid utility through XP. Works like a charm. Now I have an SATA drive but I sort of defeated the whole purpose of it. I wanted the OS on the SATA drive for speed purposes. I guess I'll settle with this configuration.

Thanks for your help,

Gravity

 

[dbwillis]

Youll need the drivers for the chipset on a floppy disk to do an F6 during the boot off CD for Win XP for it to see the Sata drive I think.....AMD or P4?

 

[Gravity]

AMD. I have tried that. I keep getting an error that the driver caused an unexpected error. Do I need to enable the SATA on the bios?

Thx

Gravity


Edit: File \winxp\viasraid.sys caused an unexpected error (18) at line 2108 in d:\xpclient\base\setup\oemdisk.c. Press any key to continue.

Then I go back to the "s" menu and try to install a 2k driver or the nt 4.0 driver...same message. Is the proggy trying to install the drivers to "c" instead of the SATA drive? Do I need to format the SATA drive before I do this driver install? This is a seagate barracude.

BTW: AMD 2500 and gigabyte KT700 MB

Thanks

 

[Gravity]

Update:

Flashed bios twice, the SATA/Raid utility won't allow me to setup or view the raid even though it's sata. I was able to format the drive using the seagate dos utility and the board sees the drive but I keep getting the same driver error. Very perplexed at this point.

Gravity!