Problems reformatting

[MoBsTa]

When i boot from the cd and go into setup, windows says that it cannot find any hard disk drives in my computer, and recommends me to check the connection.

However, I boot up just fine, and the devi ce manager says its working properly, but i have noticed that on my BIOS the primary IDE says none, where before it said my HDD. I don't know whats going on can anyone help?

[MoBsTa]

also, I think that some raid thing is setup that is not allowing my computer to recognize my hard drive the right way.

My motherboard is an ASUS A8V-E Deluxe with a VIA K8T890 chipset (hyperion).

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Catweazle]

You need to put the SATA RAID driver on a floppy disk (if you're using Windows XP) or on a CD, USB hard drive or thumbdrive if you're using Vista. The disk needs to be popped in the drive early during the Windows install to load drivers which will enable the install routine to access drives on your drive controller. It's a common thing with earlier VIA chipsets in particular.

I presume you're using XP, and if so you need to watch for the prompt, early in the install when you've still got white text on a blue background, telling you to "Press F6 to load drivers". That's when you need to press the function key and have your driver ready on floppy disk.

With Vista's install there's a linky on the "Which drive or partition" part of the install routine. You click on that to load the relevent driver and get drives recognised.


Best idea of the lot, though, is to throw that crappy rig in the bin and get a real one. VIA chipsets! UUGGGHHHH!!!!

:p

[bbz_Ghost]

You can integrate the SATA drivers permanently into a custom XP CD of your own making using this guide:

http://members.cox.net/br0adband/How_To_Integrate_SATA_Drivers_into_A_Custom_Windows_CD.zip

You can also add most any other type of driver for any hardware component using the same methodology, but that guide is specific to just adding the SATA drivers for getting XP installed in the first place.

Good luck...

[Catweazle]

^

That there most certainly works, but I'd have to think it's a lot of work if there's a floppy drive in the system already, and the driver files can be copied to a blank floppy from the motherboard CD.

After all, that older VIA chipset system has gone for this long without the owner yet relaising that SATA drivers need to be loaded for a clean install, so it's not an operation done very often, eh?


Anyways, I STILL think that systems which require drivers to be loaded in this way are sub-standard! :p