[Boz657]

I'm trying to install XP home SP2 onto a new WD Cavier SATA HD and It's causing me great pain.
I got my floppy ready with drivers from my mobo's website (ECS 760-M Rev 1.1), stuck my xp cd in, hit f6, stuck in my floppy and hit enter. It then flashed up the original request to 'Insert manufaturers disk etc'.
I have made countless combinations of floppys where I have copied the entire 'Disc Image' folder, copied the contents and copied all the files to the root of the floppy.
I have downloaded the latest drivers from the SIS website for the RAID controller (SIS 764/180) and made the same combination of floppies with these drivers.
I may be making the floppy disc wrong so if anyone can shed any light on that I'd be grateful.
Whatever floppy I use, windows refuses to read it.
If I don't use a floppy, the setup hangs before you get to the first option screen for partitioning the drive. It doesn't report it can't find a mass storage device unless I press f6 when prompted.
It is read fine in my BIOS and I have triple checked every setting and these are correct to the best of my knowledge (SATA enanbled, SATA mode IDE, Boot other device enabled, Boot order CD, Floppy, HD)
I thought I would be sneaky and install windows on a IDE hard drive, install the drivers through windows and migrate the HD image to the SATA drive.
So I found an old and creaky 7 gb HD, set it up, unplugged my SATA drive and windows installed perfectly.
Not a problem.
Installed the drivers that I'd downloaded from ECS site. Installed fine.
Checked in hardware manager and SIS RAID controller was there, device working properley.
Connected my SATA drive, booted into windows and it just hangs at the Windows XP loading screen. The picture loads but the blue progress bar doesn't move.
The next time I boot into windows it gives me the option of booting into safe mode, last known good config, normal and nothing works.
Remove the SATA drive and all is OK.
I have also done the same with the new SIS drivers and no joy.
It is now driving me mad!
I know it sounds like my SATA drive may be faulty, but it was brand new and I've read countless reports about what a nightmare setting up SATA is so I want to be sure there is nothing I've missed. Is there any way of testing my drive in my current situation (My other pc has no SATA connections).
Sorry about the massive post but I didn't want to leave any thing out!

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One thing I forgot to mention is that I tried changing the SATA mode in my BIOS from IDE to RAID.
When I restarted it went into the RAID BIOS set up screen. It detected the single sata drive but gave a disc size of 0GB.
Would this be correct?
The drive is an OEM model and I havn't formated it and neither has windows as it has never detected it during install.
When I save and close this screen it boots back to the windows home screen where it hangs like before. I've still got my IDE HD in to boot into windows with.
Again, remove the SATA drive and all is fine.
Thanks for any ideas!
Keith

[Boz657]

One thing I forgot to mention is that I tried changing the SATA mode in my BIOS from IDE to RAID.
When I restarted it went into the RAID BIOS set up screen. It detected the single sata drive but gave a disc size of 0GB.
Would this be correct?
The drive is an OEM model and I havn't formated it and neither has windows as it has never detected it during install.
When I save and close this screen it boots back to the windows home screen where it hangs like before. I've still got my IDE HD in to boot into windows with.
Again, remove the SATA drive and all is fine.
Thanks for any ideas!
Keith

[warriorscot]

First make sure yuo have it connected in the corect port some are usually reserved for RAID only, also download the drivers drom your mobo manufacturers site for your mobo they should have them.
Then just go through the windows installation.