sata and xp

[benjamat]

I am going crazy over this.

I am building a system with the following.

maxtor 160gb sata
Asus P4P800-x mobo
Lg Ga4167 dvd drive
geforce 3 graphics card.

It is really just a gathering together of bits I have left over after other upgrades.

When I put in the sata drive the system regularly fails to boot first time but often boots after ctrl alt del. ( it fails to enter windows at all.

I have tried just about every combo of bios settings with no change.

At the moment using the settings from the manual the drive is configured as drive 3.

If I configure in compatability mode the drive is drive 1 but I have exactly the same problem.

Using the bios safe mode, in device manager the sata drive shows as p10 mode. I can set this to udma5 in the bios and it shows in the device manager as udma6, but none of this makes any difference to the problem with startup..

When I put an old 20gb ide drive in the system boots as normal.

Please please anybody, some new ideas please, I have already reinstalled xp twice and the same problem.

many Thanks.

 

[benjamat]

Oh, sorry, one other thing.

In the bios I have the option to enable or disable 32 bit transfer.

What does this do, I thought xp was a 32 bit op system.