Install problem with SATA drive on Abit AN8 board...help!

[MiG29TangentBoy]

I recently got an Abit AN8 Sli motherboard, and have been trying to install WinXP Pro on it. A Seagate 320GB SATA drive is set to be the Windows install drive (and only drive for now): it goes through formatting and installing of primary files fine...but upon rebooting, just goes right back to booting from CD drive instead of continuing to the GUI install portion. Formatting in NTFS shows as normal on the drive...it just doesn't try to go through the gui install after the initial format. Setting it to Hard Drive boot after this setup just gets a "disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del to restart" message. RAID is disabled, and I don't think any drivers should be needed for a single SATA drive.
The drive reads fine in BIOS. Drive was perfect before this, as was the memory, CPU, etc.. Is this a weirdo SATA problem? It reads ok in SATA ports 1-4, but does not show up in BIOS in ports 5-6 (the ones up near the CPU socket). What the heck do I do?

 

[Standpoint]

Can't hurt to try to put the SATA/RAID drivers on a floppy and then press F6 during windows install........

 

[Tigerbiten]

Put Memtest86+ on a floppy or bootable CD and run it.
If you have a memory problem then it will bork the install of Windoze.

Luck.....