I just finished building a new system for a friend. I am trying to install windows xp on a sata drive and I keep getting this error message. Does anyone know what this means and how can I fix this problem.

setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on a nd properly connected to you computer, and that any disk-related hardware configurations is correct. This may involve running a manufacture-supplied diagnostic or setup program.

Setup cannot continue. to quit setup, press f3.

I have ran the diagnostic disk from hatachi and everything was fine. I am using a pc chips m955g and processor is a celeron D 533fsb 2.4 ghz. 256 pc 3200 ram and a hatachi 80 gig sata hard drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You need to copy the SATA drivers from the MBoard CD onto a floppy disk. When first starting the WinXP install, a screen will appear that says to hit F6 if you need to install any SCSI or 3rd party drivers. Hit F6 and supply the floppy disk. DO NOT remove the floppy disk until instructed to.

Correctamundo!

"...but in my defense, it was dark, I was drunk, and it was delicious!"

Thanks for the quick response othehill. I am not able to find any sata drivers on the cd that came with the motherboard. All I have in there is Raid and IDE. Whenever I try either of those I get an error and it refers to D:/winxpsp1. I don't remember the full error I will have to reproduce it. Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks for your help

Sounds like your Mobo doesn't support SATA drives.

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it's suppose to its a brand new pc chips mobo and it has the two serial ata ports onboard.

That's funny that they don't give you the SATA drivers for the chipset. I would go to the manufacturers' site and see what they have there in the way of drivers.

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Try the makers website as grasshopper suggested. The drivers are probably in the folder for the RAID.

This seems to be a problem that is not unique to this board or situation,according to my searches.

I looked up this mobo on the pcchips website and in fact,it does support up to two SATA drives.However,there are no drivers listed as available for SATA support..odd.

Doing a further search, I see the problem replicated, some specific to Hitachi SATA,some not,across different boards and chipsets.Same problem.

This is a tough nut to crack.

If you can find the drivers, which seems to be half the problem, I found this,which agrees with the manual install from floppy posted above.

I would call the companies tech support and find out where the driver files can be found, or to send you an upgraded CD.

Here is the procedure:

February 07, 2004
Loading Windows XP on a SATA drive
Just in case anyone else has this problem and doesn't want to spend an hour figuring it out...

If you are loading Windows XP onto a computer with a serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, you will have to manually load the SATA drivers.

As suggested on this usenet post, you need to put the drivers on a floppy disk.

Copy the drivers from motherboard support CD *\DriverDisk\SATA\*.* into root directory of floppy disk. (i.e. root directory of floppy disk should contain \pide and \sata folders, txtsetup.oem, etc. files.)

Then, boot system by Windows XP installation CD, when the message "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" shows up, press "F6". Then, press "S" to specify additional device when next screen pops up. Put the driver floppy disk you made in and press enter to continue. If the floppy disk is made successfully, the installation program will ask for selecting driver. Please then select "VIA Serial ATA RAID Controller(Windows XP)".) After SATA driver loaded and Windows XP can recognize the SATA HDD, you can continue to install Windows XP as usual.

This should work fine if you have the drivers on a CD somewhere

Hi,

The chip that controls SATA/RAID on that particular board is the VIA VT8237- Look in the manual starting at page 46, and it will explain what you need to do.

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Just out of curiosity-What if you don't have a floppy drive?

That is why you DO ORDER a floppy drive. If you have 2 optical drives you can burn the drivers to CD and use one for the OS and one for the drivers.

Floppy drives are obsolete, case space consuming, and virtually useless pieces of crap...

Which are unfortunately still necessary. ;-)

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I am having the same problem with win2k Pro. however, I have a Floppy, I have put the drivers onto a floppy, setup says 'Please choose one', I choose one, and I still get the 'no drive' error.

I've upgraded BIOS to the latest, the POST says I have a drive. My next step is to see if I can shut off the IDE FasTrak RAID stuff to see if that makes a difference.

Is there anyone out there that was successful in this endeavor? All this advice is nice but I can read and follow procedure as well as the next guy... would like some real time exp on this problem.

One cannot have too many socks. -Albus Dumbledore

I have exactly the same problem as the orignal message. I've contacted Pc Chips tech support to try and get the right drivers (waiting a response). Has anyone else had any luck with this issue?

Same problem w/win 2000 pro, MSI PT880 mb (VIA chipset), P4 3.2Ghz. Clean system, finally got the WD 120Gb SATA drive (WD1200JD-00HBB0) formated using vendors "Data Lifeguard" tools. Had to partition & format from a floppy created by the WD CD. Drive looks ok, BIOS sees it, tests ok with WD tools. This site clued me in on using F6 during win 2000 install from CD. So after some trial & error (the MB utilities CD has 4 possible SATA drivers) I got what I thought were the correct drivers & textsetup.oem on a floppy, hit "S" when asked & got a SATA driver selected. Everything looked fine but when it came time to start Windows, bingo, no drive found! I tried all available drivers from the MB CD with the same result. Obviously the right driver wasn't loaded, so now what? Any suggestions?