Frustration

[illusionofjoy]

With the box of parts which arrived in the mail yesterday, I began the process of attempting to resurrect my computer. I've decided to do the resurrection and upgrades piece by piece, so as to make sure everything works. Thus, I began with the hard drives.

The physical installation of the drives was no problem whatsoever. When I booted my system up, upon doing the usual hardware inventory most computers do when starting up, it happily reported not one but two 1TB hard drives were now attached to my motherboard. So far, so good...

The trouble came when Windows XP Setup began running off of the OS install disc. When I got to the screen asking if I wished to install Windows, repair a corrupted version of Windows or quit, upon choosing to install I was informed that Setup could not find any hard drives installed and I had no other options but to press F3 and quit. A little research revealed that XP Setup sometimes requires third party RAID drivers in order to recognise SATA hard drives on Asus motherboards. So, I hooked up a spare floppy diskette drive to my computer and used joi_division's computer to download the drivers for my motherboard from the Asus website onto a floppy disk.

I rebooted my computer and began running Windows XP Setup again, this time poking at F6 until I was prompted to locate the third party drivers which XP would need to use so it could install itself. I pointed Setup towards the A drive and selected XP SisRAID180 and sent Setup off the install Windows, thinking all would be well. Again, I was told that Setup could not find any installed drives.

I recall encountering this problem four years ago when I first built the computer or something similar to it when first trying to install Windows XP. Obviously, I was eventually overcome, but I can't for the life of me remember exactly how it was done. I know I'm on the right track, but I must be missing something. Anybody have any ideas?

Comments

[trhodes.livejournal.com]

It wasn't just an "install" or zip file on the disk right? It's been years (~6) since I've had to deal with Windows related issues - but I seem to remember most driver downloads being .zip or auto extracting .exe files. Those will probably be ignored by the Windows installer and you would need to get the actual driver files (I think like .dll, .inf, etc). Armed with those on a diskette, you should be good.

[illusion-of-joy.livejournal.com]

I used the Asus makedisk.exe application to extract the drivers to a floppy. The disk I've been using contains uncompressed drivers with the .dll suffix for Windows XP and Windows 2000 (not that I need the latter, but that's what's on there). So you can see why I'm so baffled as to why Setup isn't doing what it should, once pointed to the floppy.

One suggestion that was given to me was the fact that maybe trying to do both hard drives at once is what is making XP Setup act floopy. I was told to try installing XP with only one SATA drive connected and then add the other drive after it was installed. Report forthcoming after testing...

The only other idea I have is that the BIOS may need to be updated.