Hi everybody!

I have purchased a brand new 750gb sata hard drive today, installed and connected it to my Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. However, during boot up, it detects the new drive but it hangs at the screen which says "press F2 to enter raid configuration utility" and does not progress any further. This stage is just after the memory count and IDE drive detection, it not even passed the stage where I can boot from CD.

If I set the SATA jumpers to the disabled position, I can boot up on the original IDE drive which contains the operating system but the new drive is not detected.

Can someone please help me to get my new hard drive working please?

My system specs are (if they are of any use)

Motherboard: Asus A7N8X-E
RAM: 1GB
Hard Drive: 120gb +40gb (IDE) and 750gb (SATA (having problems!!!))
CPU: AMD Athlon 3000+ XP 2.1GHz
Graphics card: Nvidia Geforce 5200 FX

Bios: Award Bios, version 1009 dated 02/04/2004

Thanks in advance

Is this drive intended as the Boot OS drive. You need to install SATA drivers. What happens if you do press F2?

Its not intended to be an OS drive, and nothing happens if I press F2

Why are you tryoing to boot from the CD?
If just using for storage then first be sure you connected to the first SATA controller. Then verify the controller is Enabled in the BIOS. Boot into XP and look in disk managment for the drive. You can partition and format the drive there. In order for the SATA drive to function properly you need to have SATA drivers installed. Those would be found on the MBoard CD or Asus website. The SATA controller may show in Device manager, in which case you should be able to update the drivers.
You MUST have at least SP1 installed in order to use a drive that large as one partition.

If you read my first post correctly, I did say that the drive IS DETECTED but it hangs indefinately during POST so I cannot even boot into Windows using my standard drive.

I did read that but you stated that you had a jumper on the MBoard set for RAID configuration at that time. Elswhere you mention not being able to boot from CD. Did you try booting without the jumper and looking for the drive as suggested? The COMMON way the SATA drivers are supplied when using SATA Harddrive with your series board is to install the drivers during the Windows installation. Because you are not intalling Windows to this disk you need to work around that.
The issue here is that Windows needs the SATA driver in order to deal with the SATA drive.