Can't install windows on my SATA hard drive!

Hi everyone,

My old IDE hard drive went out on me so i went and bought a 500g WD SATA hard drive. When I put the windows installation disk in it does not recognize my SATA hard drive. after looking into it online, i found that alot of people had this issue. I read a few suggestions and tried them, (using the F6 function during install with drivers on a floppy disk, and streamlining drivers intot he windows installation disk itself using NLite), and none of them seem to work. I then used my friends old IDE hard drive, installed windows, and used a program to make a disk image of my hard drive and transfer it to my SATA drive. This didnt work either. I havn't fiddled with drive letters, (you know c:\ and e:\ and so on) i am thinking this may help but I am not sure. It is not a boot order issue i know how to do all that and nothing works. I am looking for a way to get Windows XP onto my SATA drive. (yes my mother board detects my SATA drive, and it is showing up in windows i just cant seem to get windows on it.)

I would prefer to just copy it from my IDE drive since i have already installed all the updates so if this is possible please let me know.

If you know what kind of boot disk i need for windows xp installation to recognize my sata drive during installation that would be a big help too. (i have tried sata controller drivers for my motherboard, i tried using the software that came with my hard drive, and this too didn't work.)

thank you for all your help!

so you are saying clone my hard drive while not in windows? how do i do this?

do you have any suggestions as to what program to use? i already tried cloning it like that and it didn't work.

no it doesnt. thanks man ill have to try it, ill let you know how it turns out.

Before doing any of the suggested, check your bios again to make sure of the SATA emulation.

If you know what south bridge is on your board, especially an ich##"R", it is usually better to set it to emulate an IDE interface rather than to default it to a SATA (I or II) at first. You will then be able to install your OS like any other IDE drive. You can activate AHCI/NCQ if you want to after installing by upgrading the IDE driver in device manager (ignore any warnings), rebooting into the BIOS, changing back to SATA, saving changes, and you're done.

Contrary to popular belief, NCQ will actually slow down your system, assuming this is not going to be a server (and you defrag regularly) so I would suggest skipping the change.