I have been having a nightmare installing a 500 GB SATA HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10) that I recently purchased. I have been experiencing serious issues installing it on my Asus K8N (non-deluxe) Nforce3 motherboard. The drive was displaying strange behavior since the first install of Windows XP SP2 that attempted: e.g. system hangs/restarts 5 seconds into windows after reboot from Nforce3 chipset driver install, system would not boot into windows and stays at black screen after POST screen, hanging at XP welcome screen, and most recently, system restarts during Nforce3 driver install. What was even more frustrating was that I returned the drive to Canada Computers in a panic (as the 7 day return policy was in effect) and swapped to a Western Digital Caviar and experienced the exact same issues. At that point I was convinced it was a motherboard/Sata compatibility issue. [b]My system[/b] Asus K8N Motherboard Sempron 3000+ 2x256MB Samsung DDR300 Ram Sapphire 9600 [b]Background Information[/b] -Asus K8N only supports SATA I but SATA should be backwards compatible. However, I have jumpered the drive to force SATA I compatibility -Ran memory tests and Seagate Seatools HDD Test, both passed without errors detected -Tested the system with a more powerful PSU -I have updated the motherboard BIOS as recent releases have been reported to fix SATA HDD detection bugs -Installed the third party chipset ide drivers before installing XP None of the above solutions worked. However, the drive works fine when installed as a slave drive to my original IDE drive. After some investigation, I found out that this was somewhat of a known issue. It was discovered that SATA drives and Nforce motherboards don't get along- issue with the drive's Native Command Queuing. A solution that has worked for some was to disable this feature in the device manager but this has not helped. I have yet to solve this issue. The only things I have not tried yet are updating the HDD's firmware and trying a PCI SATA controller card. If anyone has any ideas or knows of this issue, I'd appreciate any comments you may have. Evan

What version of WinXP is on the installation CD? Did you install the SATA drivers when prompted to at the beginning of the WinXP installation?

The CD is Windows XP with SP2 Slipstreamed. I also tried with my old SP1 CD which produced the same issues. Yes, I did install the SATA drivers at the beginning of the installation.

Are the SATA drive, processer, and RAM, properly identified by model numbers at startup? How did you install third party chipset drivers BEFORE installing WinXP? How old is the CD drive that is being used for installation? I'm not aware of issues with SATA drives and nForce3 chipsets. That is not to say they don't exist. Are all the BIOS values set correctly? Processor and RAM at stock speeds?

SATA drive, CPU, and RAM are all properly recognized at bootup. I installed the third party SATA and RAID drivers during the beginning of the XP Install when asked to "Press F6 if third party SCSI drivers need to be installed" The CD Drive is maybe 2 years old. Processor and RAM are at stock speeds and have never been changed, not even for testing.

Looks like you have covered most all the bases. Did the BIOS updates specifically mention the SATA drive issue? Thinking back, I do recall some issues with some SATA II drives not working properly. The only suggestion I could offer would be to copy all the cab files to the harddrive and run them from there. Could the size of the drive have an impact? Possibly partitioning would help. Honestly, If that were my drive I would be breaking it up into at least 4 partitions simply for backup purposes. Try using the drive utility from the manufacturer to partition, if you decide to try that.

The only thing I've ever read about nF3 & SATA problems where in regards to overclocking.