HDD not detected at boot

[mrquick42]

I am in the middle of my first PC build and I'm not sure if I have a dead hard drive or if I am doing something wrong. The drive is recognized in the BIOS but during bootup I always get a message that says: Detecting Drives: No any device found. Trying to install Windows XP Pro always fails with Stop: 0x0000007E which Microsoft website says indicates that there is not enough hard disk space to install.

This is a Samsung SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB SATA HDD. I tried plugging in an old Samsung IDE drive and the BIOS and bootup both detected it successfully. I have tried plugging the new drive into every SATA port on the motherboard and I have verified that the SATA cable is a good one and nothing has made a difference.

So does it sound like I have a dead drive or is there something else going on here?

Other system information:
ASUS P5Q SE Plus Motherboard
Intel C2D E7300 CPU
4 GB OCZ Reaper 1066 DDR2 memory
Thermaltake 500W PSU

 

[MrLinux]

Either use F6 and load the (SATA) Chipset driver from a floppy, or change the BIOS so the HD is operating in IDE mode.

 

[mrquick42]

I don't have a floppy drive at the moment so I can't test that solution. The default setting in the BIOS was for IDE rather than AHCI mode so I think have tried the second solution.

I have a SATA DVD Burner hooked up and the system can read from it just fine. Would this indicate that the motherboard is properly configured to use SATA devices and the hard drive is junk or is there something else I am not considering?