Bios wont detect hard drive

[TRDCorolla1]

What kind of error is it giving you?

 

[kjchui]

What kind of error is it giving you?

After rebooting the BIOS, i place the motherboard cd drivers in and it continues to proceed until 1) I click load from cd-rom and it gives me a "hard drive doesn't detect HPA or 2) if I dont click anything, it freezes by trying to load it from the hard drive

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Do you have Windows XP already installed on there?

 

[kjchui]

Do you have Windows XP already installed on there?

No not yet, is that the problem?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Could be. Put in the Windows XP CD and reboot. It should pick it up and start with the long installation process. Now, somewhere during the process in the early stages, you will see on the bottom of the screen that says to "Press F6 to install third party drivers" or something like that. Press the F6 key to install your SATA hard drive drivers that came with the motherboard.

 

[kjchui]

thanks a bunch, ill give it a try and post the outcome sometime tomorrow

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Yeah, it's getting pretty late here. Almost midnight, falling asleep.....

Yeah, the first thing you need to do is to get that Windows CD out and install it. SATA drives are a huge pain to install (software wise). Disabling RAID helps a bunch majority of the time, but now, you also need to install the drivers for it during the install process. That can get a little hairy. If it came with SATA floppy disk, that make a lot easier. Otherwise, you'll need to go to your motherboard manufacturere's direct website to download the SATA hard drive drivers and copy that over to a floppy disk. Then install all Windows all over again using the F6 key. We'll see tomorrow how that works out.

 

[kjchui]

what if I dont have a floppy drive? Can I burn it onto a cd instead?

 

[kjchui]

could I also use an usb drive?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

It's pretty picky when installing SATA drivers. I think you absolutely need a floppy to get it going. I don't know the logic behind Windows, but it searches info from the floppy when the F6 key is pressed. Wierd.