hey, i bought a new hard drive yesterday, it was the SAMSUNG SPO812C. It is a SERIAL ATA harddrive. My motherboard (AS ROCK K7S8X) does not have a SATA host on it so I bought a host adapter for it today. The adapter I bought is 350SA SERIAL ATA PCI CARD. I have installed the harddrive along with the host adapter exactly, and accordingly to the instructions provided. However it still does not work When my computer starts up, the black DOS screen shows my DVD/DVDRW being detected. Then it asks me about my RAID drives (which has only appeared ever since I plugged in my SATA adapter) and wants me to set the drives for it, by pressing F4 or CTRL-S. When i do this nothing happens except my PC speaker gives an annoying muted beep! Then afterwards DOS displays the following information: PRIMARY DEVICE: NOT FOUND SECONDARY DEVICE: NOT FOUND Then DOS attempts to find an operating system but it cant. So i then tried to installed WINDOWS XP and i pressed F6 to install a third party SCSI/SATA device. I followed the instructions and I installed the host device which came up under the name of "SILICON IMAGE SIL 3112 SATALINK SERIAL ATA CONTROLLER", as stated in my instruction manual for the host adapter. So on went my installation of windows. It asked me to partition the drive and then select where i wanted windows to be installed. So then the partition began to format and my setup files started to copy over. Then it said my system needed to reboot in 15 seconds. So i let it. So when my system restarted, i expected my windows installation to continue but it started back at the beginning of the installation again :-( I have tried all sorts. Microsoft wont help, samsung wont help, and neither will Q-Tec. I will be very happy if someone knows how to fix this. Basically all i want is for my new ATA drive to be the main hard drive which boots up with my installation of windows xp on there. Thank You

I'm not sure about this but am guessing that since your motherboard does not have any inbuilt SATA controller, it's bios does not have an option to enable it to boot from an SATA drive. The boot order options probably include CD,Floppy or Harddrive (IDE 0/1) During the first stage of XP Instal, the system boots to the CD. After copying setup files to the drive it reboots looking for the harddrive and the remainder of the instal process is done from there. If your bios cannot recognize the SATA drive as a boot device then you cannot use it for your operating system. I could be way off target here but if you have an IDE drive available, use it to instal your operating system and the SATA drive for storage. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

ok, thank you. I have taken that into consideration but my BIOS is upgraded to accept SATA devices so i dont see why it wont work. BIOS is detecting the controller, but the controller aint able to initialise a drive. Thats the only problem, cos my BIOS is set to boot up from any available device so if that harddrive is the only drive connected to my motherboard then SATA controller should be able to boot up the drive, depending on whether it can detect it, which it cant at the moment. Thanks a lot for your help and opinion on the matter, it is very appreciated. I am willing to keep trying though. If anyone has had this problem or knows of anyone who has had this problem, please give me an opinion or hopefully a suggestion on how i can resolve this problem :-) Thank You

When it reboots you are asked if you want to start with the CD ROM but do nothing at that point and it will start from the hard drive. Don't select to start from the CD ROM again. (It's been so long I forget which button it asks you to depress in order for it to startup using the CD again. Just don't depress it.) By saying you want to start from the CD ROM again it does and starts at the beginning of the install process of copying the files. You do want to keep the CD in the drive because the installation is going to need it again. You can actually pull out the CD after it is done copying the files and before it restarts but be ready to get it back in there when it is looking for the networking drivers or it gets ugly. Regards, Bryan

hey i already done that. usually when i set up windows it restarts my computer after copying the setup files. i dont need to press anything and setup continues automatically from where it left off not at the start. i have not been asking the computer to boot from cd. like i said the problem is well before windows and any windows setup. its at the first DOS screen i get, at the memory test and your primary/secondary ide master/slave detection screen. it says there about detecting RAID drives. and where it seeks for the drive on my PRIMARY RAID CONTROLLER it displays NOT FOUND, and also the same happens on my SECONDARY RAID CONTROLLER. i need my SATA controller to be able to recognise that there is a drive connected to my primary controller on the SATA card. also there is a prompt for me to set up RAID drivers by pressing F4 or CTRL-S but when i do this i get my pc speaker giving this horrid muted sound. Thank you for your reply and attempt to help me, it was very appreciated. however if you have anymore information on how i can get things fixed, please give me your inpout ah this thing is driving me up the wall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More ideas... Without the CD go into BIOS to enable your SATA drive. Make sure that the connector that you enable in the BIOS is the same connector number that it is attached to on the SATA controller card. HTH Bryan

Iv already done that, still no luck??? Even been on the phone to "professionals" and they have not got a clue they are completely and utterly stumped. Half the professionals had never heard of an SATA PCI controller. some professionals they are, cost me bloody £1.50/min to call them!!!! im ready to throw the computer out the window now!! usually that kinda thing works, what do yous think!!!