Hi, I am at my wits end here.... I have just purchased an Abit NF7-S and Western Digital 200GB hard drive (WD2000JD) Serial ATA150 and I am having a nightmare trying to get this to work. The problem. BIOS does not detect the drive in auto detect hard disks. FDisk does not recognise this either. However, after booting up with the XP install disk, and hitting F6 to install third party drivers, what I DID find is that the windows install detected and formatted it as expected (after installing drivers). Great, except when the windows install needs to reboot midway through install, I get back to square one as bios does not seemingly recognise the system disk (which should now have at least a partly installed winxp on it to boot). What I have tried. I have tried adjusting the boot sequence in bios with SCSI as 1st boot. Failed. Tried with Serial ATA as 1st boot. Failed. Tried getting it to detect any system disks to boot from and unplugged cd rom and floppy. Failed. It is running on SATA1 so checked that. I have tried it with the drive jumper (on the drive) in all positions from primary master to secondary and nothing. I have also tried it with no jumper at all which I believe is the best way. Please help - this is driving me nuts. Cheers

check this out, maybe it will help http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1156&p_created=1075336919&p_sid=VhQnC_jh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9OSZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPXNlYXJjaF9mbmwmcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1pbnN0YWxsIHdpbmRvd3Mgc2F0YQ**&p_li= yeah... its a lengthy one! to sum it up tho, it says during that process you must install drivers, so that when you reset your machine, it should know your hdd. i really hope this works for you!

You don't need drivers because it is not a RAID array. Jumpers are moot because SATA drives operate on their own channel and therefore have no master slave relationship. You need the WD drive tools to prepare the disk for an O/S. It is a free download and makes a bootable floppy for you. If THAT does not recognize the drive then either the board or the drive (or the cable) is the problem. Also of note is that ABIT and Asus boards do not play nicely with SATA drives and simply will not work at all with some of them. Make sure you have the latest BIOS upgrade as well. Jimi_l

Thanks justin/Jimi Yes justin i knew about pressing F6 and that's what got windows detecting the drive, as i explain above WINDOWS installer did find it format it and install the pre reboot part of winxp, seems by problem is with the boot disk. I have tried your diagnostic tool Jimi and indeed the drive does who up I am doing a test now on it, but where to from next? There are no options to make it a boot disk or prepare the drive for an OS (I assume it was adequately prepared by the winxp install that it went thru before booting?), all i see is write zeros to drive??!?

PS Test completed without errors

Hmm so test showed no errors, but still cannot boot via the sata drive. I'm all out of ideas and about to throw it through the window.

I think you may have gotten the wrong tool, Try this one- click here