[Bobboau]

he isn't melting the MoBo he's melting a small part of a peice of plastic atached to the mobo, he basicly just needs to push the lever into place and touch it with an iron.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Kosh



No, unless user errors are covered by the warrenty (which I highly doubt).

[color=66ff00]It doesn't sound like a user error to me, sounds like it was poorly designed.

Don't most guarantees cover faliure due to normal use in any case? They seem to here but then again UK/Irish laws seem a bit more sensible than america's.
[/color]

[redsniper]

well, it's too late. I've already got all the hardware installed and it boots through POST just fine. Now it just won't detect my SATA HD which also happened the last time I built a computer, so all I have to do is remember how I made it work last time.

[karajorma]

Install windows drivers most likely.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Are you installing windows?
[/color]

[Taristin]

I could not get windows to detect my SATA alone, even with the drivers. Windows needed to have a PATA HDD to steal the boot sector from.

[redsniper]

This is my old HD. It already has Windows and stuff on it and according to the repair guy who diagnosed what was wrong in the first place, it was unaffected by my old mobo dying.

[StratComm]

I hate to ask the stupid questions, but it'd be aweful to miss something like that.  Does the system BIOS natively support SATA drives?  You may check to see if the drive is listed correctly there and in your boot sequence before worrying about your boot environment.

Oh, and lvlshot'd smilies make Firefox cry.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]The problem with windows is that even in an age when floppies have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs you can't get the drivers on CD-rom. Win installation doesn't allow you to detect drivers from a CD from what I've read.

Bit of a major oversight given the boom in SATA technology.
[/color]

[Admiral LSD]

As I mentioned in a thread on this a while back, if you're prepared to hack your Windows installation files it's possible to get the XP installer to load SATA drivers from CD-ROM. I have two XP CDs here that load the drivers for my SiI3112 SATA controller allowing me to install it needing a floppy drive (which I've since removed).

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Nice one Admiral, that may come in very handy in the future.
[/color]

[karajorma]

Originally posted by redsniper
This is my old HD. It already has Windows and stuff on it and according to the repair guy who diagnosed what was wrong in the first place, it was unaffected by my old mobo dying.

Check the CD that came with your motherboard for a SATA driver and install it.

When you're installing you need to press F6 to bring up the option to install SATA drivers if you want to put windows on a SATA drive. Otherwise it's generally done once you've got windows up and running.

[redsniper]

So... SATA drivers are motherboard specific, and the driver I installed last time around is of no use now so I have to install a new SATA driver which is most likely on my mobo cd?

[karajorma]

Sounds like the likely cause.

[Admiral LSD]

SATA drivers aren't motherboard-specific exactly but chipset specific. If your new motherboard had the same (or similar) SATA controller as the previous one then your old driver should have worked. Assuming you ended up buying the A8N-E board you mentioned in your other thread then you've gone from probably a Silicon Image chip of some kind (most likely a 3112 like what I have) to the integrated nForce4 SATA. If you're lucky, there'll be a floppy included with your mobo that contains the SATA driver for Windows setup but if you're not, you'll have to download the nVidia nForce4 driver kit, crack it open with Winzip or something, locate the text-mode SATA driver and stick that on a floppy.

Another option is to do what I did and integrate the SATA drivers into the normal Windows Setup. This is probably the best way to go as it eliminates the need to mess around with floppies and external drivers etc. There are numerous ways to do this, the way I did it was to edit the main setup .INF file directly to make the driver available in text-mode setup and then creating an unattended installation file to install the complete driver post-installation according to various guides in this thread:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8892

Another, simpler, method is to use a program like nLite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

Also, upgrading a motherboard without reinstalling Windows is a bad idea, don't do it

[Bobboau]

is there a jumper you have to twiddle with? I remember I needed to close a jumper to tell the mobo to even consiter the posability that there might be a SATA drive atatched to it.

[Kosh]

SATA drivers aren't motherboard-specific exactly but chipset specific.

Isn't the entire point of having a standard like ATA to keep that sort of thing from happening in the first place?

[Admiral LSD]

Open GL and Direct3D are (moreorless) standardised too, but you can't install an nVidia driver with an ATi-based card and expect it to work or vice versa.

The standard defines how the drives and controllers communicate, how the controllers communicate back to the host PC and the OS is up to individual manufacturer. It's always been that way and probably always will be.

[redsniper]

Hmm, well... If I have to reinstall Windows I will, but there's some stuff I want to get off of my HD first. I'm trying to think of how to go about this. I've got a second HD that I use to backup some stuff but it's not a complete backup so I still want to access my main HD. It has Win98 on it right now, I'm thinking that if I format it NTFS, and install XP and the SATA drivers it should be able to access my primary HD. Does that sound plausible?

[Admiral LSD]

XP can read FAT32 just fine. Just don't think about formatting your XP drives as anything but NTFS

/me hopes MS drop FAT support from Longhorn