Windows setup cannot detect a confirmed working hard drive...!?

[EvilYoda]

So, new mobo (ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe), case and PSU, and formatted HD on this computer...and now:

A.) BIOS takes forever to load the IDE drives, every time.
B.) Windows setup takes forever to load up to the blue part
C.) After I hit "enter" to install Windows, it says that it cannot detect a hard drive, even though I just had the hard drive on this system, and the data was copied and everything.

Ideas? Help???

 

[montag451]

get into bios, and have a good look at settings -
voltages - RAM@2.7v min
check speed of cpu/fsb
what does bios show hdd as?

 

[EvilYoda]

The bios shows the HD as the right size and model and everything. I haven't even bothered playing with the memory timings yet, I was gonna tinker with those after I had the system up and running...mobile 2600+ is running at a stock 2000 too. ugh. I'll see what the voltage is at.

 

[Paperlantern]

boot to a floppy and just see if FDISK sees the drive, id be curious to see if that detects it, if windows setup wont detect, thats strange. What windows is it, i'm not sure you mentioned... XP? XP Home? 2000?

 

[EvilYoda]

It's Windows XP, no SP1 integrated.

It'd help if I had a floppy drive...guess I'll have to give in and go pick one up. dammit.

I unplugged the box and I'm checking over the connections and whatnot...I barely have anything connected at the moment, I don't know what else I can check. Everything's just so slow...I can put another HD in there and it still takes a minute to load the IDE drives, then takes like 10 minutes to finally get into Windows Setup, and from there says that it doesn't detect a hard drive.

wtf is this, I've never had this problem before.

 

[EvilYoda]

Don't know why it's working, but between me unplugging it and going over the connections + throwing another hard-drive on the same cable as the 160 gig, it's loading everything as normal and setup even detected both drives. I don't get this, could someone please explain why the system needed two HD "slots" filled?

I put a random 4.3 in there, so hopefully it'll still work when I put the 250 with the 160.

 

[montag451]

did you set the jumpers for single drive/slave.............?
well done

 

[LTC8K6]

Plain XP can't use drives larger than 127GB, you know. You need at least SP1 to use bigger drives.

It's likely it just truncated the drive to 127GB.