i just got parts for my pc i'm building. the specs are 2.2 AMD64 dual core two 1 gb sticks of ram corsair sata 74gb raptor GA-K8N Ultra SLI gigabyte motherboard nvidia eVGA 7600sli 256 win xp http://www.gigabyte.co.jp/nippon/k8n-ultra-sli/photo_k8n_ultra_sli_big.jpg (web address of mobo photo) ok so all the parts are together everything seems to work fine but i can't seem to get the bois or window to reconize the hard drive. if you look at the photo you can see the 8 sata ports four are nvidia and are in the cmos, four are Silicon image whch is SATA II and has its own bios, needs exttra driver, also for the RAID, and it sees the hard drive when in raid setup. I followed the manuals instructions got the driver to floppy pressed f6 when asked for third party raid scii or something driver and it read the drivers fine exactly like the manual told me but it still doesn't notice the hard drive,thats for the Silicon Image, ie you can't get to the screen to patition the drive for ntfs,setup windows. But on the set the nvidia, i didn't need any driver, probably because its already there, the bios doesn't reconize it nor does the raid setup, but windows reconize the hard drive, but it won't get through the dos part of setting up windows xp, when it restarts for the next part of the installation it just starts over, never gets to the part to input the ID code. yeah i know thats long but i have no clue any help would be nice thanks
If the BIOS isn't detecting your SATA drive, first make sure the drive is spinning by touching it and seeing if it is vibrating. If it isnt spinning make sure its plugged in all right and dandy. If the drive is spinning, make sure the SATA cable is connected properly, try different SATA slots on the board, try using the nvidia slots, if those dont work go to the silicon image ones. Keep trying until you get the BIOS to detect your SATA drive, after you get that to work, then you try installing windows. Ok, make sure you have your SATA/RAID drivers for whichever chipset you are wanting to use. Copy the drivers on the floppy. Now, reboot, boot from CD to the windows disc, smash F6 a few times, select the XP driver, hit enter and if you used the right driver it will detect the drive.
yeah this might be a problem for gigbyte themselvs i might just end up calling them anyways, if i use a driver for the nvidia ones it doesn't reconize the drive but if i use nothing it works for hte first half of the install. However there is an executiable file thats on the motherboard cd that extracts the necessary file to the floppy, there are a few options for which files to extract to it is possible that there might be a typo or something and the files i need are just not hte one they say to extract, but thanks for the help and encouragement, i'll keep trying things
ok it was a problem with the driver from the cd, the exe file witch extracts the files to the floppy has some options, the ones used would be SiI3114, SiI3114RAID, and SiI31145, since i don't have a raid setup i just used the first one (they recamended using the SiI3114RAID5), anyways, no the nvidia is just sata the silicon image is sataII wich i got working witth that driver, now the issue is getting windows installed, which is not going so well, i had it once but i forgot to take the cd out so i went through the process and starting setting up windows, and now it stopped liking hte cd and when it gets hung up on a file its just stops reading, oh well i guess i'll have to get another copy of windows or borrow someones, i dunno and how would i know if its SATAII complient or not
