XP installation problems with SATA hdd

[soonerfan1]

MSI k7n2 Delta2 mobo
Athlon 2.15 ghz
512 mb ram

I just bought a new seagate 7200.8 barracuda hdd and I'm having trouble installing win XP home. First off, there was no drive detected when plugged into SATA 1 on mobo, so I tried plugging into SATA 2 and it detected the drive. I then used seagate's DiskWizard to format and everything seemed fine until after format I got a message drive format wasn't completed because of an error.

I went ahead and booted with the xp disc and loaded the sata drivers from floppy but as soon as it gets to "Setup is starting windows" thats as far as she goes.

This is my first experience with SATA and I just don't know where to go from here to troubleshoot.

 

[Ctrackstar126]

The first thing to do is to insert the floppy disk that came you will need the drivers first before an installation can occur

 

[HPTech]

Ctrackstar126 is correct. You will have been provided with a SATA driver disk to install before the main install. F6I believe during the start of the load of the Windows XP disk.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: HPTech
Ctrackstar126 is correct. You will have been provided with a SATA driver disk to install before the main install. F6I believe during the start of the load of the Windows XP disk.

Hummm....that's interesting because I have the EXACT same mobo with an 80GB SATA Seagate drive and I didn't have to load any drivers during the XP install.

soonerfan1 - You need to check the BIOS, make sure the SATA ports are set to AUTO. I'll look at the BIOS settings when I get home from work, but it should work fine in SATA port 1.....unless you have a bad port.

What size drive are you installing XP to? When you setup XP, tell XP to format the drive in NTFS. You shouldn't have to press F6 and load the SATA drivers since the ports are in IDE mode by default.

 

[soonerfan1]

Thanks for the replies all, I did try F6 and load SATA drivers from floppy as noted in original post (I guess I wasn't very clear) and, BadThad, I had enabled SATA in the bios I'm not sure how to set SATA to auto, the only options I saw were enable/disable(under peripherals I believe).

My hard drive is 250 gig