[Old Goat]

Hello, all. I am a recording musician, and , in a fit of "[bleep], I can do that", I decided to build a new music 'puter. I bought a barebones unit from AVADirect. ASUS A8V-E SE mobo, Western Digital SATA HDDs (40 and 250G caviars) Radeon 9250 vid card, Athlon 64 2.0g CPU.

My problem is that I managed to get the thing to start booting twice, but didn't know that I had to load drivers for the SATA. Both times it quit after the 'to load drivers, press F6' prompt, saying 'no HDDs detected. Okay, I understand now, but now it won't boot. I get the beeps and the HDD LED flashes, then I get the ASUS screen, and I can change the boot sequence to cd-rom 1st, but then it jus sits there with a little flashing bar in the upper left of the screen. There's no floppy drive on the machine. I have tried resetting the bios. Can someone please help me?

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In the BIOS, is it showing any hard disks on the SATA controller? I'm also guessing that both of your hard drives are Serial ATA, in which case you will need a floppy drive, to install the SATA drivers before you can install Windows to one of the drives.

[Kurenai]

In the BIOS, is it showing any hard disks on the SATA controller? I'm also guessing that both of your hard drives are Serial ATA, in which case you will need a floppy drive, to install the SATA drivers before you can install Windows to one of the drives.

[Old Goat]

I was told I could load the SATA drivers from CD when the F6 prompt comes up, but I can't get that far anymore. It only started loading twice, the first time I didn't know about the drivers, and the second time I just missed it. Now the machine won't even start loading the XP.

[SRX660]

Just had a similar problem with acomputer. I finally ended up using the windows floppy disk exe file to make a set of floppy disks to get the computer to even see the Windows CD.

http://support.micro...b;en-us;Q310994

and some more help here.

http://support.micro....com/kb/314859/

SRX660

[Old Goat]

Thanks. I'll check it out.
I read somewhere that XP is finicky about loading on an HDD that has files on it--like maybe the bits from my first try. Anybody know anything about that?

[SRX660]

That was the reason i needed to use the floppy disks. A previous attempt to install crashed and then windows would not install at all.

What i did not attempt at that time was to use the Hard Drive makers utilitys to write all "0"s to the drive and then try installing.

SRX660

[Old Goat]

I don't have a floppy drive--can you clean the HD in the machine, or do I have to stick it in another computer?

[SRX660]

The HD makers utilities can be burned to a CD and used that way.

As an example.

http://support.wdc.c...m...d=3&swid=53

Please use the utilities made for your drive by the original manufacturer.

SRX660

[Old Goat]

Bingo! Thank you, SRX660! That utility did the trick. It was a 4 hr download (I'm on dialup), but I ran it and the OS went in w/o a hitch.

Thanks again. And thanks for not just letting the thread die a lonely death.