SATA Drive Nightmare

[Gouabafla]

On a recent trip to the US, I bought my son a new Maxtor SATA drive for his pooter. (It was cheap and a flurry of text messages assured me that his mother board could handle it).

On installing the new drive, his pooter now just gives a good old blue screen of death.

We've tried all sorts of things to ressurect it and the following points may (or may not) be of interest.

a. If we don't install Sata drivers at the outset of Win XP setup, XP won't recognise the drive.
b. If we do install Sata drivers (and we've tried lots of different ones) XP Setup recognises the drive and starts to install Windows then falls over completely.
c. We can install Win 98 without problems and it runs well. (Why go to XP you ask? Because he only has a copy of Office XP and that won't run under Win 98).

Half term is nearly over and having spent almost all of the holiday installing and uninstalling Windows, number one son is about to go mad. Does anyone have any bright ideas?

Oh, it's an MSI motherboard with on board Sata control using the VIA chipset.

[danfulton]

Look here, and see if it helps, involves updating the motherboard BIOS and SATA drivers I think.

http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=20&threadid=63571&enterthread=y

Cheers

Dan

[Engineer]

Does your bios recognise the new hard drive

[spannersatcx]

have you tried maxtor.com (http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/entry.php)

[Gouabafla]

Thanks for the comments, folks.

Yes, the Mobo does recognise the drive - we can get it to work fine with Win 98. I've looked at the Maxtor website but they don't give much help.

The viaarena link looks worth following up on.

I guess what I really want is someone to give a one line solution that will allow XP to run without a blue screen of death.

\wishfulthinkingmode off

[Engineer]

This is from the Maxtor web site

The Serial ATA controller is not automatically recognized during Windows 2000/XP installation. You will have to install drivers for the SATA controller to be able to install Windows 2000/XP onto a SATA drive. If you do not install the SATA controller drivers, Windows will not recognize the SATA drive.

The drivers for your SATA controller need to be available on a floppy disk otherwise you won't be able to install them during the operating system installation process. Should you only have a CD, copy the driver files onto a floppy before attempting to install Windows 2000/XP. If you do not know how to copy the drivers to a floppy you may go out to the manufacturer's website and download the driver onto a floppy.

Solution:
During Windows setup, you will be prompted to press F6 to "install additional controller drivers", at this point insert the floppy diskette with the SATA controller drivers and follow the onscreen instructions.
After the drivers have been installed you can continue with the Windows installation.

If you own a Maxtor SATA 150 PCI card you please download the Maxtor SATA PCI Adapter Card Driver.

and this is the web link (http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1522&p_created=1057008423&p_sid=4Imndlyh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ 9MTcmcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1zZWFyY2hfbmwmcF9wcm9kX2x2bDE9NjYmcF9 wcm9kX2x2bDI9JnBfY2F0X2x2bDE9ODMmcF9jYXRfbHZsMj0mcF9wYWdlPTE *&p_li=)

[Pablo Martin]

Engineer is absolutly spot on.

I have SATA you just need to look really carefully during windows setup. Sort of blink and you miss it type thing, so keep your eyes open at the start of the set-up but don't be suprised when it doesn't ask for the disk with drivers on until later in the installation. Or so I found!

Hope you get it sorted :ok:

[Gouabafla]

Thanks for the suggestions folks. Unfortunately, we have been installing the SATA drivers using the f6 command and that hasn't worked. We used the drivers that came with the motherboard and then downloaded the newest ones we could find on the motherboard website. In both cases we still got the blue screen of death!

We tried installing XP without the SATA drivers but the system couldn't even find the hard drive. Still, it makes a change from blue screens....

You can probably tell from this that we've tried to install XP more times than one would normally wish, this week.

Thanks for the advice. Number one son has now decided to cut his losses and live with Win 98 while he gets back to revising for his A levels - which is what he really should have been doing all along!

[stickyb]

What is the error message on the bsod?

[spannersatcx]

Are you installing XP from fresh or over 98?

Are you sure office XP doesn't work with 98, I seem to remember having it installed on my pc with 98 on long before upgrading to XP?

Are you setting the drive as a raid array or just a drive on it's own, if you are using it as a raid drive then to the best of my recollection you have to install 2 hard drives?

I have a SATA drive on one of my pc's but it's not an array as it's a single drive!

[Engineer]

OK try another approach You stated it was a MSI mobo then have you looked on the web site (http://www.msicomputer.com/support/sup_tshoot.asp#3_3) trouble shooting section

[Gouabafla]

We've tried installing XP from scratch and also over '98 - neither works.

I've had a good look at the MSI trouble shooting section, but nothing seems to fit our problem.

Son has now gone round to a friend's for an all day lets-watch-all-three-LOTR-films-back-to-back-in-extended-version session. And I thought he was going to get on with his Physics A Level assignment.

[Engineer]

What mobo is it and what is the error message displayed by windows?

[Stoney X]

I have a MSI motherboard with a Maxtor SATA drive on it. Runs WinXP no probs. I installed the mb and the harddrive myself and I did have problems when I initially set it up. Firstly the mb has both Ultra ATA and Serial ATA and I had the drive plugged in wrong :\ As you get Win 98 working I guess that's not your problem. Secondly I received two driver floppies, one for SATA and the other for Raid stuff. The labelling on the two disks had me quiet confused for a while and the wording that popped up in the F6 bit in WinXP setup didn't help much either. I may have (was over a year ago now) got the blue screen of death a few times before getting the confusion sorted and selecting the right option. When you do the F6 part of the setup, what exactly are you selecting from the floppy?

Regards
Stoney

[Gouabafla]

Hi Engineer - sorry, I missed your question first time round.

Unfortunately, we didn't note the exact workding of the BSOD. It was something along the lines of "Windows has detected a problem and is shutting down' followed by a series of numbers and letters that were very confusing.

The mother board is an MSI K76V with an Athlon 1800 cpu.

When we do the f6 thing, we've tried a variety of drivers - the floppy that came with the MOBO only had one driver which gave a BSOD, then we downloaded the latest drivers from the MSI website, dug around on the Maxtor site and tried a few third party via drivers too - all with the same results.

I wonder - why have Msoft insisted that the only way to load a Sata or Raid driver is via a floppy. As far as I can tell this is the only point where XP requires the use of such old hardware (take me back to my first laptop - a two floppy Toshiba, lasted for years and never let me down).

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Have you enabled SATA in the bios?

You'll probably find the answer to your problem here. (http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?board=13.0)

Read the stickies and search the forum before posting.

:cool:

TOG

[Engineer]

Is it this mobo (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=511) because cannot find K76V

If so do you have the correct driver (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/driver/dvr/spt_dvr_detail.php?UID=511&kind=1) and latest BIOS (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_detail.php?UID=511&kind=1)

Notice in v1.5 BIOS update HDD compatibility issue were resolved and in the latest version (v2) the VIA RAID BIOS is updated.

One anomaly that I notice which others on the forum may be able to answer is that in the driver download package the drivers are for SATA RAID and PATA

The question is does the SATA RAID driver cover both a SATA and RAID configured HDD or should there be a separate driver for each configuration?