WinXP: "No Valid Hard Disk Drives"?

[Unsolved Paradox]

Finally fixed a previous problem (you can read about my woes here), but have come across a new issue.


My system:

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3000+
MB - Asus K8V
RAM - 1 GB KingMax PC3200
HD - 2x Maxtor 160 GB S-ATA
DVD - Sony DWD-18A dual-layer
VID - ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 XT
AUD - Sound Blaster Audigy 2


When I go to install Windows XP, after putting in the appropriate Promise S-ATA drivers via floppy, it promptly informs me that there are no valid hard drives in my system. This happens whether I've pre-partitioned/formatted in Partition Magic or with completely blank HD's; for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Any pointers, please?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Dual SATA RAID
The Promise 20378 RAID controller incorporated two Serial ATA and one parallel connectors with RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 functions while the VT8237 RAID controller provides another two Serial ATA connectors for RAID 0 and RAID 1 functions. The K8V is the ideal solution to enhance hard disk performance and data backup protection without the cost of add-on cards.

check your connections and goodluck

 

[Unsolved Paradox]

Erhm, I'm not running any sort of RAID whatsoever, and the cables were set up by a techie for me. Would there still be a potential cabling problem?

 

[rufous03]

Try going to "Control Panel"..."system "..."Hardware" then to "device manager" click on the + at disk drives and see if your drives are shown. If they are you can (a) uninstal the device and reboot letting your computer re-recognize the drive. if that doesn't work or your drives are not shown, in control panel go to "Administrative tools"..."Computer Management" then to "disk management" all drives should be listed and assigned a letter...if no letter is assigned, drive will not be recognized (check windows help files for further help on assigning drive letters) Good Luck...hope it helps

 

[Unsolved Paradox]

Unfortunately, since I can't install Windows, there's no GUI option for me to pursue.

I checked my BIOS to see what's up, it has blanks for primary master/slave. Could that be the problem? My MB is running the VIA K8T800 chipset, if that helps...

I'm at the end of my rope, no clue what to do...

 

[rufous03]

Sorry, thought you had XP already installed. The only thing I can think of is ....is your copy of XP a valid copy or a downloaded version? What does Partition Magic do when it is inserted? Does it allow you to reformat and label your drives? If Partition Magic runs ok, then connections are not the problem.

 

[Unsolved Paradox]

I actually have both a valid and 2-3 download versions; all of them have the same problem.

Partition Magic (I'm using the floppy, made in 8) works fine, but the partitions/formatting it does resulted in corruption before (which lead to my previous problem, link in first post).

The techie I talked to said to use the WinXP partition/format tool, which I can't get to (unless I can run that separately from an install process). Should I give PM another go?

 

[Unsolved Paradox]

Been looking around; are there any partitioning/formatting tools other than Partition Magic that would be recommended?