[Donald6794]

...so I'm sure I'm an idiot for this......but here goes nothin'.....

Recently a friend asked me to help him build a computer. Now I took a class in high school on computer maintenance and repair... it wasn't much, and I in no way consider myself a computer tech... but I have been able to build multiple machines... and troubleshoot both hardware and software. I'm a bit rusty as of right now... seeing as I haven't built a computer in a little over a year, and I stopped salvaging computers about 2 years ago. But point being... My friend and I are both fans of Windows 2000, so naturally, my friend wants 2000 on his machine. Now here's where I'm an idiot. I know nothing about SerialATA... but I went ahead and advised him to purchase 2 SATA hard Drives since I had heard so many good things about them. Well... when the time comes to put the computer together... I find my self having trouble getting Win2k to recognize these 2 hard drives. The motherboard came with a cd of drivers, and a floppy disk of SATA and RAID drivers... but those didn't seem to work out too well for me. The only info I suppose I could give that might help is the brands of products I am using... and the speeds of my hard drives, and what my mother board supports. So I guess... here they are:

Hitachi/ 80 GB/ SATA
Samsung/ 500 GB/ SATA II
MSI K8MM-V/ AMD Socket 754

...I hope someone out there can clear all of this up for me...

[Advertisements]

Yes it can, during the boot phase of the installation CD at the bottom screen you will see "If you need to install third party drivers press F6", you do that and follow the prompts and insert a floppy with the correct drivers. I don't know if you will be able to use them on a CD since I haven't tried.

Right now I'm on PCLinuxOS with a sata drive using an add on card and it picked up the drive just fine. The only problem I had was I needed to make an old fashioned boot floppy because of the rather primitive bios of this older machine.

[Tyger]

Yes it can, during the boot phase of the installation CD at the bottom screen you will see "If you need to install third party drivers press F6", you do that and follow the prompts and insert a floppy with the correct drivers. I don't know if you will be able to use them on a CD since I haven't tried.

Right now I'm on PCLinuxOS with a sata drive using an add on card and it picked up the drive just fine. The only problem I had was I needed to make an old fashioned boot floppy because of the rather primitive bios of this older machine.

[Donald6794]

I tried that...but maybe I'm doing something wrong.....or don't have the right drivers. The motherboard came with a floppy disk labeled "Sata RAID Drivers"......that is the only disk I have...I tried it.....but it still didn't seem to read the SATA Drives. I am utterly confused, and I really don't want to let my friend down....what do you think?....

[Troy]

Have you tried enabling SATA drives in the BIOS? Usually you can set everything up from there. On my ASUS board, I have the option of Off, Native, or RAID. Not sure what the MSI BIOS looks like, but I'm guessing it would be similar...

[Donald6794]

...well... The only 2 options this MSI board has are: IDE , RAID ...so in turn... If I purchase a SATA to IDE converter, and set my settings to "IDE"... will windows then recognize my SATA drives at IDE? I am lost... and obviously out of the loop.

[Neil Jones]

If you set the option to IDE, in 99% of cases you don't need anything else. No F6, no floppy, no nothing. You don't even need a SATA to IDE adaptor. Just install 2000 as normal and it should see the drive.