Motherboard not recognizing hard drive

[Craig7850]

ok...

Most of you know I recently got my computer built - set up the bios - and now I am installing Windows XP Home.

The installation starts up... does its thing - but then it gets to the part where it has to recognize a hard drive and well.. it doesn't recognize mine.

So - I went to my motherboard's website ( Gigabyte ) and downloaded their drivers. Burned them to a floppy.. and well.. they don't work.

and I'll add in here that my Bios, however, DOES recognize the harddrive.. windows, on the other hand, does not.

Does anyone know what I need to do, to get my Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI motherboard to recognize my Western Digital Caviar SE16 ( WD2500KS ) hard drive? It's a SataII btw... if I forgot to mention :roll:

Thanks,
Craig

LINK TO MY MOTHERBOARD: http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-K8N-SLI.htm
LINK TO MY HARDDRIVE: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=133&Language=en

 

[AtomRiot]

Wasnt this posted by someone else to? i dont know. You should make sure your raid is disabled in the bios. I have the 8i955x and had to disable the raid to boot to my sata2 drive. On my board there was two settings because there are two different raid buses so make sure you do the right one if you have two.

 

[AshyN]

Enure RAID drivers are installed. When installing windows push F6 when you get the option. Put the floppy which has the drivers. You can download the RAID drivers from website @ SATA RAID Drivers

Best option is to use windows xp with sp2 CD as it has updated SATA RAID drivers.

 

[Crashman]

Don't listen to AshyN misleading you. You don't have to load drivers for your system, the nForce4 SATA controller is recognised by XP setup as a generic IDE controller, using XP's default drivers.

Atom is right of course. Make sure you disable RAID mode anywhere you can find it in BIOS. Then set your boot order, CD then hard drive. And you'll probably find another place in BIOS to select which hard drive to boot first, it should already be set to the only hard drive that's currently in your system.

 

[Crashman]

Why is it whenever someone gives good CORRECT advice, one of you "add the driver" guys jumps in and ruins everything?

 

[pat]

because they are called SATA drivers, which is BAD.. so SATA=drivers..

 

[Crashman]

Without digging them out I'm trying to remember what they labeled the last set of driver floppies I got...I think one was labeled "nVRAID" and the other "SilXXXX SATA/RAID" (where the XXXX is the model number).

Obvious with that kind of labeling that one driver was for the nVidia controller in RAID mode, and the other was for a Silicon Image controller.

 

[pat]

You're right. For the nvidia, it is labeled RAID. for third party it is SATA/RAID.. when it should be labeled IDE/RAID.. Because RAID and IDE both use the same interface to communicate with the drive..

 

[Crashman]

Like I said, it SHOULD be obvious, that one disk is for the nVidia controller only in RAID mode (no floppy needed for the nVidia controller when RAID is disabled), and the other disk is for the Silicon Image controller.