SATA 250 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 21 - Won't Install XP?!

[donmezz]

Hi,

I recently bought a 250 GB Maxtor STM3250310AS DiamondMax 21 SATA hard drive and fitted it to my rig, specs are:

Asus K8N 7 Socket 754 (2 SATA ports)
3.2 AMD 64 H Drive
1 Gig of Samsung DDR 400 RAM

I boot xp CD first (changed in Bios so CD is primary boot) which then leads me to screen saying "Press any key to load fromCD" I do that too, which then it says "Checking system configuration" and then the screen goes black (as in DOS black not switches off etc.) From this point is just won't budge.

I tried installing XP on my old IDE drive and it does not hang and goes into the XP installation mode no problem.

The only thing I can say is that in the BIOS it detects the Maxtor as the third IDE Primary Disk whilst the 1st and second it says nothing is detected. But there is no way I can move the Maxtor to the top. If you know what I mean (hopefully).


On top of this, I can open the drive and put files into it no problem when XP is lanuched through another drive. So in terms of it working as a backup drive it works fine.

Can anyone help me please on this long winded query?

Many thanks in advance.

[dangel]

Does it work if you unplug the original disk? (not sure from your post)

Sounds like a mb/bios issue more than the drive - although I have had certain drives not work with certain mb's in the past (but it's rare).

Have you got another PC to try the drive in?

[donmezz]

I have the other drive (IDE) connected with the IDE cable, but no power to it. So it does not detect it in the bios.

I will try it on my mates pc I reckon, just wanted to know if I was doing something stupid first.

Cheers

[dangel]

Doubt it's you - you may have an incompatibility there (which would suck) - but as a general rule unplug as much as possible when having problems (stripping back will often lead you somewhere useful). G'luck!

[donmezz]

cheers foe the advice. I will test it in my mates pc and see what happens. I fear it may be too much hard drive for my mobo to handle.

Will post how it goes.

[dangel]

Cool - try a bios update (if avail) too

[donmezz]

my friend just told me that XP does not support SATA natively? That I need a SATA driver or something? I don't have a floppy drive on my rig! Is this true that I need to put the driver in?

I have formatted the disc before trying to install xp. I am trying to install XP original with no SP2 or 3

[kalniel]

Doesn't windows have problems booting from a non-active partition? My guess would be you need to set the new drive to have an active partition before XP will boot from it.. and unfortunately this sometimes prevents even installation from XP disc (or I found anyway). I think I ended up booting from floppy and running a partition program to create/set the first partition on the disk to active and then it was picked up on install fine.

If XP didn't support SATA natively then you wouldn't be able to drag files across to it. However you can run the drive in legacy/IDE mode via the BIOS, which I would recommend anyway.

[dangel]

Do you see the "press f3 to install additional driver" bit in the XP setup? In which case, yeah that's when you'd normally feed it a floppy with a SATA driver on it. The only other way to do it is to 'slipstream' the driver into your install disk - this can be done with http://www.nliteos.com/

You'll need another windows install to do that from though - so perhaps your friend can help?

[donmezz]

I can't get to the "press f3 stage" it hangs before that stage. I may try the "slipstream" though. Thanks for all the help!