Hi i am having big problems. Well where to start? 1. I decided to build my own pc. I have never done this before! 2. i have brought all of my parts and here they are: 400w PSU AMD Athlon 64 bit 3500+ sct 939 Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI-8Σ ATI Radeon 9700pro 512mb 3200 400mhz kingston ram CD Rom 200gb Maxtor SATA HDD 1.44 floppy 3. Right i now put all the parts together and connected them up. This seemed easy enough 4. Turned the PC On the bios recognised my HDD and CD ROM 5. Came to install windows 98. heres where the prob started 6. put in windows 98 boot disk and typed fdisk - hope this was right. I then got "No Fixed Drives Present" 7. After trying 3 different boot disks i.e. original, and 2 downloaded still had no effect. so i couldn't put windows on. 8. i connect my old 40gb IDE HDD from my old pc and this then loaded windows 98se even though i got the error SYSTEM.INF missing or deleted - or somthing like that. 9. Now windows loaded it wanted to install all this new stuff and wanted the windows 98 disk put it in the cd rom and next prob cant detect my cd rom even though it is detected in bios. 10. went to my computer and no cd rom and no SATA Hard Drive. So now i am stuck i dont really want to use the 40gb IDE Hard drive as the primary one just as a back-up i want my SATA 200gb to be the main one. 11. So here are the probs: FDISK wont work SATA Hard drive not detected CD ROM Not Detected Want to put windows xp pro on but cant - no cd rom! 12. I ask for your help - Please could you help me as much as you can. i am using a different pc at the moment. Thanks Mark (haynzee)

why are you even trying to install windows 98? Just buy windows xp pro, get some oem version off newegg.com or something for cheap

haynzee In order for the SATA drive to be seen by Windows you need to install the SATA drivers. Unfortunately there ARE NO SATA drivers for Win98. As was mentioned, you need to get WinXP. Then you will need to copy the SATA driver to a floppy disk and have it ready to use when first installing WinXP. When a prompt appears on the screen that asks if you need to install any SCSI or 3rd party drivers hit F6, do so. If your CDrom isn't working then you have something wrong with either/or the following. Cables, jumpers, settings in the BIOS for drives. Set all drive settings to Auto. Install the old 40GB harddrive as the Master on the Primary IDE channel and the CDrom as a slave on the Primary. The SATA drive should be connected to the first SATA controller. In the BIOS set to boot to SATA first. Don't use cable select on the 40GB or the CDrom. Use master and slave settings.

Also, it's always a good idea to test your RAM before getting into the software installation. If it's bad, you're just wasting your time: http://www.memtest86.com Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz 512MB PC3200 Asus Ti4800SE 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

First off you need to get the CD ROM working. Unplug any other devices you have connected to an IDE channel, namely the 40GB drive. Once you have that working, use the install software CD that came with the hard drive. If you didn't get one then download the software from the DRIVE MANUFACTURER. It will partition the drive and get it ready for any version of Windows you want to run including 98. Jimi_l

Using the 40GB sounds like a whole lot better idea than throwing more money at micropsoft. M2

There are a number of issues at work here. Win98 can't access a HDrive larger than 137GB and the SATA drivers need to be installed prior to the OS. While I am not one to support MS and HATE WinXP, in this case I think it would be the best route to take. haynzee The problem with the CD rom is probably due to you erroriously thinking that the SATA drive is the Master drive and setup the other drives accordingly. SATA controllers and IDE controllers are totally isolated from each other. For the purposes of setting up the drive configureation treat the 40GB as the master on the Primary IDE channel.