SATA Drives and the BSOD

[mr insomniac]

Recently I purchased a 250 Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA hard drive. My plan was to replace the 3 older, slower hard drives currently in my system with this one drive, and a net loss of only about 30 Gb of storage space (which I wouldn't miss).

 

It's my first experience with SATA drives, but I'd spoken with a few knowledgeable friends and neighbours and they assured me that I should have no trouble (since they didn't).

 

So... removed the three drives, connected the new one, powered up my PC, formatted the drive, and did a fresh install of windows xp. Everything was fine, everything went smoothly and I arrived at my desktop safe and sound. Changed a few settings around to get things the way I wanted, removed my xp CD and rebooted the PC.

 

Immediately after reaching the Windows startup screen, I got a BSOD. I forget the exact error message but I believe it was a generic "make sure your drive is connected blah blah." kinda thing.

 

Restarted the PC. On startup, the BIOS was still detecting my SATA drive, so I know it was connected properly. And yet every time the startup reached the Windows Screen... BSOD.

 

I hooked up my old C: drive again, thankfully it hadn't been formatted yet, and went surfing for some explanation and possible solution. I discovered that:

 

1. in the BIOS settings, I had to change the onchip SATA controller from RAID (since I only had one drive) to Native Mode, which allows for only generic IDE drives to be used. This didn't make sense to me, but I went with it.

 

2. Make a floppy disk with RAID controller drivers on it from my motherboard CD, which I did with no troubles.

 

3. Re-install windows again, and when prompted to "hit f6 to install 3rd party RAID drivers", hit f6 and install from the floppy disk.

 

Now, Windows setup will not detect my SATA drive unless the onchip SATA controller setting in my BIOS is set to RAID. That's problem number one.

 

Problem number 2 is... windows setup will not read the 3rd party drivers from the floppy disk when it's supposed to. It says it cannot detect SiSRaid.sys (and three other files it needs) and if i choose to skip the install of these drivers, I'm back to the BSOD.

 

Anyone experience this before, or have any ideas or workarounds? Apologies for the long post, but I wanted to give as much detail as I could. Motherboard is an ASUS P4S8X-MX.