I have bought this new Maxtor 80gb S-ATA drive and i can't get it installed. I have a Asus A7N8X-deluxe mobo. When i go into the raid setup in bios the drive name was detected and i formatted it (low level format). when i booted up with the xp install cd after it would not recognise it either. i don't know what to do. the s-ata jumper on my mobo is set to enable. is my power supply to weak maybe?

Here are the devices i have

msi cdrw
300w psu
2 case fans and one cpu fan.
no floppy

this is really depressing please give me some help

HI,

Do you hit f6 during installation when prompted and then load the sata drivers?

i did press f6 once and the setup did not detect any hard disks. the sata options was not there

try holding the f6 button down, and if you're using a microsoft keyboard, make sure the f lock is enabled. You do have the sata driver on floppy right?

eh no, there was no floppy included with my mobo. only a install cd for windows. is there anywhere i can make a bootable floppy and install them? maxtor has no support on this.

Maxtor's support for their Sata drives is bogus to say the least. Use the drive from Western Digital, it's the same controller which you have on your ASus board and follow the downloading instructions then copy it to floppy. http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

It's the serial ata controller. When prompted in the XP set up, hit F6. It'll come up on the bottom of the screen during initial set up. Then a screen will prompt you to load any serail ata, raid, scsi, mass storage devices. This is when you insert the floppy and press enter. From there, you should have little problems.

Thank you very much tony. That was exactly what i needed. I've never installed a sata disk before. Guess what, right now i have windows installed on it and it works great.