Hard drive issue?

[UMCorona]

I'm currently building a new PC and having some trouble getting XP installed. Here is what's happening:

I've got a WD 250gb SATA2 drive hooked up to the ASUS P5LD2 motherboard in the first SATA slot (which is the 3rd IDE Master as far as the BIOS is concerned). Everything fires up fine and the BIOS recognizes the HD and the DVD drive.

I have the boot order set to the DVD drive first, so I boot up with a retail Windows XP CD. It starts going through the loading/install process, but before it gets to the point where you set a drive letter and format/partition it blue screens with a screen that says this:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive and make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Okay. The drive is brand new and is the only one connected. Changing the SATA cable and which SATA port it is connected to doesn't solve the problem.

Next I tried booting up with the Western Digital Data Lifeguard CD (which says it's bootable), but it just hangs up every time when trying to boot. After that, I booted up with the BartPE Ultimate Boot disk. That loads up fine and gets me to the emulated Windows XP with access to all of the random utilities on the disk.

While there, I can run the WD Data LifeGuard Diag tool and it shows me that the HD fails the SMART test on the line that says:

(Unknown Attribute) | BE | 61 | 45 | 44 | 0

I don't know what exactly this means, but the little I could find about it was that it's a known error where the drive is looking for a sensor that isn't there and it shouldn't affect anything with the drive. Everything else passes. I then ran both the quick and extended tests on the drive and both show no issues.

Next, I run MBRWizard to check the MBR. It shows "No partitions found on this disk." which is normal since there aren't any partitions yet. If I then try to activate a partition on the disk, it fails with "Error: 21: - Invalid Partition Selected"

Then, if I try to run CHKDSK on the drive I get: "CHKDSK.CMD is not available for RAW drives."

I can't seem to find any way of creating or activating a partition on this drive, so any help would be appreciated. Oh, and I've also tried booting up with an older Win2000 install CD and it fails at the same point as the WinXP install.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Is the "virus protection" option in the bios enabled? If so, try disabling it.

 

[UMCorona]

No, there's no virus protection enabled in the BIOS.

As for new updates, I've tried using an older HD on the IDE channel, instead of the SATA HD and it's coming up with the same issue. During the XP install (both Home and Pro versions), after loading all of the drivers and junk it gets to "Starting Windows..." and then blue screens.

I've also tried running the XP install CD with no HDs attached at all with the same results. At this point I have no clue what the problem is.