MSI K8N Neo Platinum SATA Drive Boot

[Han Cholo]

Hey all. Ive seen threads on message boards all over with the same problem i have, yet no one has posted a solution. I have a MSI K8N Neo Platinum mobo with an AMD 64 3200+. I just bought a 250gb Maxtor SATA drive and have yet to succesfully boot from it. When i boot from an IDE drive, windows sees the drive and i can read and write from it fine. The problem is when i try and install a fresh copy of win xp on it, it loads the install files, but then when it restarts, it says "Error loading OS."

Ive fiddled with the BIOS, but with no luck. Ive even disconnected every ide drive connected and it still wont boot from the SATA drive. Im 100% sure the boot order is correct. When i installed windows, ive tried both with and without the sata raid drivers that came with the mobo, but nothing there too. MSI has the hardest tech support to reach so can someone help me?

 

[iahk]

When I was goofing around with this, I just ended up installing Windows with only the SATA drive installed. After the install completed, I reconnected the IDE drives. That ended up working well.

 

[Han Cholo]

Yeah i tried that too. For some reason it just doesn't wanna work for me. I unplugged everything except the sata drive and my dvd drive and it still does the same thing. I read somewhere that there might be a hardware conflict so i tried another cd-rom drive and still nothing. Any other ideas?

 

[LordMonarch]

I had this issue as well, after resolving I think it was related to no having the latest bios so you may try updating that first. But what I did was create a 1 drive raid array and during the xp install I installed the raid drivers from the provided floppy. this worked for me, the SATA drive was found when I rebooted.

also ran into weird problem, the board wouldn't work with any IDE harddrives until I set that to cable select instead of master/slave deal. what was throwing me off was the error codes indicated a bad floppy drive.

 

[Han Cholo]

Hey that worked but im not familiar with the whole RAID scene so can someone suggest which mode i should put it to? I have one drive in the array and i want to use it as my boot drive.

 

[Dexter77]

When installing XP (from bootable CD) press F6 at the beginning. That tells installer to look for "another mass storage controller" driver. Then insert floppy that comes with mobo. After some time installer should ask you what drivers you want to install. Select both "nVidia RAID controller" and "mass storage controller" (Im not sure about name of second device). That should help.
Also dont forget to set proper sequence of booting devices in BIOS.
Best regards.
Dexter

 

[PVD]

I had this problem until I changed the the hardrive to "large" instead of auto. It is under one of the menus. Turns out award bios won't recognize drives greater than 33gb suposedly, and you have to enable a large drive in the msi bios.