Vista not recognizing SATA drivers

S

sdlvx

Gawd
Joined
Dec 9, 2007
Messages
567
Hey guys, thanks for your time.

I'm helping a friend install his vista over the internet, and we've run into a problem. Before I go any further, here are his system specs:

core i7 920
gigabyte ga-ex58-ud4p motherboard
g. skill ddr3 1600
Samsung Spinpoint F1 500GB hd
XFX 4770

We're trying to install Vista, and it's taking 5 to 10 minutes to get into the prompts to install the OS. After this, it's not recognizing the SATA drive. I had him download the drivers from the gigabyte website for the intel southbridge and the jmicron controller, put them on a USB drive, and then use the "load driver" option from the Vista installer.

The only thing is that vista won't load the drivers. I'm a little confused as well, because I have an Asus P6T, and I never had to use any drivers for my hard drives on my intel southbridge.

I thought maybe it was a bios problem. We changed the controller to IDE mode (from SATA), disabled AHCI (it caused the HD to not show up in BIOS, it DOES show up in BIOS the way it's configured now).

I thought maybe it was a problem with Vista, so I had him download the RC of windows 7. That stopped at the same spot too, but I haven't had the chance to ask him if he tried the "load drivers" thing or not. Mandriva also couldn't find the drivers (but he was using 10.1, which I think is pretty old).

Does anyone have any ideas? He's pretty upset he spent all this money on a computer and he can't use it, just because of the O/S. It was his first build.
 
Does he get to the point where it lists the drivers you want to load? Or does it find no drivers?

He could try different SATA ports if he hasn't already.
 
The 5 to 10 minute wait for the prompts to install the OS is probably caused by the floppy drive being enabled in the bios but no floppy drive being plugged into the system, disable the floppy in the bios.

As far as the main issue, it's odd because I also didn't have to install drivers to access my drives. Try cycling through all the values (ahci, raid, sata/normal/whatever).
 
He gets a prompt to browse for the folder with the drivers in it and to scan it. After the scan it says the drivers couldn't be found.

We tried this in 2 of the purple SATA ports (on the intel southbridge), and on the jmicron controller (the white ports) as well, and neither worked.

I'm suspicious it's the hard drive that's DOA.
 
I know this'll get me in trouble, but... if you can grab a copy of the Windows 7 RC from someplace, he might be better off using that OS - and I'm not slanting Vista, seriously I'm not, but at this point it's worth checking out. He may find he gets better performance and just likes it better overall, who knows.

As for the SATA issues, I would suspect the drivers first and foremost before anything else. My suggestion would be go get the floppy-based version of the Intel Storage Matrix drivers direct from Intel (not Gigabyte) and put them on the USB stick and try again. Seems weird sometimes, but you just never know till you try.

That'll get him the very latest drivers from Intel direct (Gigabyte and most OEMs are never as quick to release as the hardware maker is) and might just get things resolved.

Good luck...
 
He tried it with win7, he had the same problem.

I'll have him try with intel's drivers when he gets back online. Maybe gigabyte screwed up their driver downloads?
 
Make sure the the Hide drivers not compatible box is not checked

The drivers should also been on the CD it came with, you would have to search the directories though.
 
I'll see if he can find them tomorrow. He just put them into the root folder in his USB thumb drive.

I'm also going to check to make sure the jumpers on the HD aren't forcing it into SATA 150 mode, i think that would have something to do with BIOS not recognizing it in AHCI mode.
 
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