Need Help Installing WinXP Pro On Asus SK8V Pleese

[RedCrow]

I'm building a new rig with Asus SK8V Board & Athlon64 FX-53 (940). I'm done with the hardware aspect of this project. I'm left with installing Win XP Pro. on;y to discover that the motherboard is not recognizing the two WD SATA Drives I've installed.

I went to the Bios to try to disable the parallel drives setups and so forth but to no avail.

What annoys me most is, it lists both SATA drives briefly during the initial boots, but that's it, it turns around & states, "

"Primary IDE master : not detected.
*Secondary IDE: Not detected

Finally I get the message: "No drive attached to FastTrack controller... BIOS not installed"

* I have two WD Caviar SATA Drives, 120G & 200G installed on the board's SATA1 & 2 Chanels. (Not interested in RAID Cofigurations at the momtent)


* ATI's X800 Pro Card,
* PC-Power & Cooling's Turbo Cool 510 Deluxe PSU.
* Plextor 712A Optical Drive.

Will be glad if anyone could give some pointers as to what I need to do in order to get WinXP Pro. Istalled.

All suggestions are welcome please.

Thanx

[fishybawb]

Different mobo, but it sounds similar to this problem:

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthre...hreadid=169047

[Midknyte]

you need to get the bios to recognize the drives first.

did you touch any of the jumpers on the hdds? you shouldn't mess with those.

check your bios settings and make sure you have the system set to boot from SATA before IDE.

[BipolarBill]

Originally posted by RedCrow
"Primary IDE master : not detected.
*Secondary IDE: Not detected

Finally I get the message: "No drive attached to FastTrack controller... BIOS not installed"

You have no PATA drive connected to the standard IDE ports, so that's no surprise. Ignore it.

The Fasttrack controller is usually for PATA drives that are connected to a single standard-looking IDE port, but it's for RAID. If you have no drives connected to that, ignore that too.

Please read your manual for info on which port is for which controller. If you have 3 or more standard-looking IDE ports and there's nothing connected to them, those warnings are to be expected. Read this too:

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthre...hreadid=150897

[Midknyte]

make sure you are pressing f6 when prompted during the winxp setup, then install the SATA controller drivers.

[FijiJohn]

At least for the SATA boards I have set up, it can range from simple to very perplexing. I have found it easier to leave any PIDE drives unattached until after installing XP on the SATA drives.
And you MUST press F6 when you start the install and you must have the SATA drivers on a floppy, and with just the right folder structure, for the XP installer to see them properly. (Figuring out how to for that with my Gigabyte board was particularly tricky while the Asus boards were the easiest.) After that all was simple. If you have two SATA drives you also need to makes sure that the boot drive is on the first channel and not the second. Otherwise that can cause it to hang with sometimes weird errors.

[RedCrow]

Thanx very much guys for helping out, just returned from work and will try the suggestions after a couple of hour's sleep. Will post a progress report as to how well it went, so please return.

Meanwhile I've got find XP Service Pack1. I'm told I'm going to need it during install.

Again, Thanx a lot

[Midknyte]

keep your system disconnected from the internet until you apply the service pack and critical updates. I would recommend you install SP2 instead, since it includes SP1 and critical updates to protect you from blaster, sasser, welchia, etc.