I installed a 120G SATA hard drive into the tower case, hooked it up to the SATA0 connection on the motherboard, and attached the power to the hard drive. Then I set the BIOS to boot from the DVD-ROM drive and turned the system on. It started to carry out the set-up of Windows XP installation and then it all stalled. No hard drive could be located. I then installed an old 4.5G hard drive onto the IDE port and booted up and installed Windows XP successfully.

Why didn't the BIOS or the board find the SATA hard drive? What have I done wrong or what haven't I done right?

Roger Wilson, Kanwal, NSW

I'm pleased your problem is now resolved.

For everyone else, the story goes like this ...


When he first contacted us, Roger had only been successful in getting his newly built system to operate with an old IDE hard drive. He followed up his question with a further one:

"Can I install a single hard drive using the SATA function, or does it require two equal drives to be installed for this method to work? If it does, what are the benefits when you still only have 120 Gigabytes of available storage but are using a combination of 240 Gigabytes?"

There's a few Golden Rules for success in system building. Read the manuals thoroughly, and look up any terms you're unfamiliar with, before you begin building.

Roger was confused by the terminology of SATA/RAID that is a feature of his motherboard. In fact, it refers to two distinct features. Firstly Serial ATA is a method for interface between the hard drive and the motherboard. It offers faster data transfer along a smaller cable than the older Parallel ATA interface. SATA has benefits for both speed and for system cooling control.

Secondly, RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology that uses two or more drives in combination with one another for improvements in performance or data safety. Roger's motherboard offers, on two of the four normal IDE channels, either RAID0 technology, which uses disk striping for faster performance, or RAID1, which uses disk mirroring for increased data security. The two SATA channels on his motherboard offer only RAID0 as an option.
Roger was also facing the problem that his motherboard's BIOS settings defaulted to those for a standard IDE hard drive.

After thoroughly studying the various manuals that came with his motherboard, and following suggestions made by HelpStation, Roger got stuck back into setting up BIOS. (Always check on the motherboard driver CD. If you browse it with Explorer, you'll often find other manuals and technical documents in addition to the printed manual,) After a long day coming to grips with the intricacies of new concepts and procedures, he retired for the night in frustration. He'd successfully configured the machine and installed Windows on his SATA hard drive, but every time he powered it up it proceeded to re-install Windows.

The following morning, refreshed, he found the last remaining problem in a couple of minutes. That's another Golden Rule of successful system building. When you're completely frustrated, and nothing you try seems to work -- walk away. Do something else. Persistent problems are always easier to resolve when you come back to them later.

In the end, Roger's problems were solved without a great deal of delay and frustration. He'd followed the final Golden Rule, as you can see if you cast your eyes a little way back up the page. When you're submitting a request for assistance to HelpStation, try to include clear, accurate and detailed identification of just what it is you/re trying to fix.

Terry O'Shanassy