WinXP on Abit AV8 and SATA drive

[Interitus]

I just built a rig for my mom's boyfriend. This is my first experience with loading windows onto an SATA drive. When installing XP, I did the "F6 to install raid drivers" step and used the drivers from the motherboard's included floppy. It then installed windows onto the drive and rebooted. Now every time I reboot, I get an error screen which says something to the effect of "Windows has encountered a hardware configuration error" and it asks for a boot disk. If I put an XP boot floppy in the drive, it boots just fine, but why do I have to do this every time it boots?

Some info that may be relevant...

There are no service packs on this computer as of yet. I had loads of trouble trying to install SP2 from the file I have on a flash drive, it must be corrupted or something.

I could not find anything in the BIOS about making the SATA drive the boot drive and in the BIOS it detects the drive fine, but doesn't list it as a boot order drive. The drive is a Samsung Spinpoint SP1213C. No NCQ or anything like that.

I did have some issues with the board's BIOS. Seems it had problems saving settings without a power off first, even then a lot of times I had to clear CMOS to get it to POST again. According to the onboard bios code readout it was hung on "Assigning INT value" or something like that.

Any ideas?

 

[boshuter]

You don't need to install any drivers unless you are setting up a raid system. If you get the settings correct in bios and have the drive plugged into the correct port on your board it should install just like any other drive.