Installing XP on a SATA drive

[BobbyDigital]

I'm trying to install XP on a sata hard drive 320 GB Western Digital if it matters. The motherboard is a Gigabyte 965P-DS3. This is a new system build and it has been a while since I have put a computer together, so maybe I am doing something wrong?

Anyway, the motherboard detects everything, including the hard drive when I boot up. Even asks me if I want to configure RAID. I can copy the Windows files from the text installation. I even hit F6 to load the mobo SATA/RAID drivers. Those load with no problems. However when XP restarts to continue the installation it won't load. I understand this is a common problem but I have loaded the drivers directly off the installation CD onto a floppy. I even tried downloading them off of Gigabyte's website, still no luck

Now, there are 8 different drivers on the CD, but I have tried each one. They have a weird numbering system which doesn't match anything. Maybe there is some setting in the CMOS I need to change? I have tried setting the sata to IDE, AHCI, and RAID/IDE none of those options seem to help. It goes to load Windows off of the hard drive and then just restarts, depending on which sata driver I load I sometimes get a disk read error.

I have no idea what else to try, I may just bring it into a computer shop , or go with an IDE hard drive and hope vista will auto detect the sata drive. Any suggestions?

 

[Ultralight]

In your BIOS is your SATA harddrive the first bootable disk? It needs to be placed as first bootable disk in order to load XP. Why? I haven't a clue but when I did my new 939 build last May I couldn't figure out why I couldn't load XP until someone gave me the above advice. Once I went into the BIOS and made my SATA harddrive the first bootable XP loaded fully without a hitch.

 

[BobbyDigital]

Yep, boot order is Hard Drive, CD-Rom, Floppy, Even tried taking the CD out, still no luck.

 

[mechBgon]

If I recall correctly, the boot drive is supposed to be on a specific plug, so check the Gigabyte owner's manual real quick and see if they say. Any good? Also, if you set the SATA controller to IDE rather than AHCI, you shouldn't need any drivers to install Windows, but you give up command queueing (if that makes any difference to you).