I've done quite a bit of searching here but can't seem to find anything relating to this issue...probably because the average person rarely deals with this these days. In any case here is the situation:

(I have some experience with PCs going back quite a while, so I am not completely nascient. Just mostly. )

1. PC's old hard drive is toast.
2. Bought new hard drive to replace it.
3. Old hard drive was SATA. New drive matches this and appears good to go.
4. Removed toasty old drive, installed new drive. Everything is kosher as far as cables and connections.

So, this drive is fresh out of the box. Looking over the skimpy manual that CAME with it, it appears an assumption is made that you already have a HD with an OS on it, and are just wanting to use it as additional storage. Not so with me. This new drive is it. It comes with a drive installation CD, but I cannot find a way to have this CD boot up. The manual mentions installation software, but I haven't the foggiest how to access it.

The good news is, the drive is "seen" by BIOS. So I am curious...should I just try RUNNING my OS CD and seeing if it will install...or, do I need to run the drive installation software first? If the latter, how the heck do I get that going?If you want a clean BUILD, just boot from OS CD and follow prompts...only problem you could run into is if the SATA Controller is not supported by the OS by default. If this is the case during the install it will say Hard Drive Not Found. And to fix this you will need to research your SATA Controller to fin dthe driver to point to for the installation. You will need to press F6 when the option comes up for installing SCSI or RAID Drivers, then insert the drivers on the floppy to a floppy drive. Then once the SATA controller drivers are mounted the hard drive should be seen by the OS for installation and everything should go smooth after that.tharkane ...... well it seems to me that if the new drive is seen in bios, change the boot sequence in bios to cd - rom first boot.......... place your windows operating system disk in the cd- rom drive . Now reboot the system........ your operating system should now begin the installation process.

dl65 I placed the OS CD in and booted from it. Things seemed fine, until SETUP wanted to start Windows...then I saw the blue screen of death. *scratching head* I wonder if this is an indicator of a more serious problem.

This happened three consecutive times. I restarted and tried again, and again, and one more time for good measure. You will now need to travel to your MBoard manuf. website and DLoad their RAID/SATA drivers and create a driver floppy/CD...
Very early on in the XP setup process you will SEE a prompt at the bottom of the screen saying PressF6 now to install RAID/SATA drivers....do that and then insert the floppy/CD that you copied the drivers to.
The XP install will now continue on properly.

Good Luck and let us know...What happened to the old HD? If it was an electrical surge you may have toasted more than the drive. If it just failed you are well on the way.

How about some specifics on the computer or motherboard make model, the make and model of the drive, and the version of Windows (including service pack that you have? Is it a real Windows disk, or some sort or restore CD?If yours was a typical BSOD, it usually comes with a "STOP" error code (usually beginning with "0x0..."). If you could provide that code, it might help us to shed some light on your situation!

Also, which version of Windows are you attempting to install?Mission successful. The SATA driver did the trick. Thanks a million. One virtual steak dinner to you guys. Quote from: GX1_Man on May 22, 2008, 04:14:08 PM

What happened to the old HD?