Hi, my first post.
I foolishly offered to fix my sisters pc after her old HD died. She went and bought a new Hitachi 500gb SATA II drive which I then tried to reinstall xp, which although i'm no expert, i've done many times with no problems.
Her system specs I don't know fully but they are something like this:
AMD 3500xp
ASUS A8V-E SE
2 Gig RAM
Nvidia PCI Graphics Card (dont know the model)
The thing is the new HD is not seen in the bios. I've tried setting it to IDE and RAID and still it's not there. I know the HD is fine as i've had it running in my own PC with no problems, also i've tried another HD in both the SATA slots on her PC and the bios recognises them so I can rule out any problems with connectors/leads/MB etc.
Now I think the MB needs the via drivers for this HD which I slipstreamed onto a XP image with nlite (as the PC has no floppy drive!) and then tried to install WIndows, but I get to the part where I can choose which drive to install and there's none there.
I've read that the Hitachi drive comes as 1.5gb sec as standard so I don't think 3.0gb speed is the problem. I've also tried the Hitachi HD tool program and that doesn't see the HD either!
I'm at a loss. The previous HD was SATA and worked fine until it died.
The options I have next are to install an old floppy drive and try and install the via raid and SATA drivers in the hope that the bios can then see it. Would this be the solution?
Should I consider flashing the motherboard's bios? Which I don't really want to do.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.