Question : Problem: Western Digital Caviar SE sata 80gb harddrive  having trouble installing xp

HI,

I have a  Western  Digital Caviar SE sata 80gb harddrive that I have been currently using as a backup drive and a 20 gb harddrive for Windows...I want to make the 80gb harddrive the main drive and not use the 20gb drive. I have an  
Asus P4V8X-X mother board with an Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.26 Ghz 512kb l2 cache , 533 MHz fs8 processor .
So, I set the 80gb harddrive up and took out the 20 gb. set the 1st boot device as the cd-drive and put in Windows, when the windows setup comes up it says it does not recognize there being a hard drive !?!?
 When I look in the bios the boot says it is a VIAVt6420 1st HDD and the Via Sata Raid Bios recognizes it as Serial Ch1 Master ,but Windows still does not recognize there being a hard drive and tells me to exit the setup..My Question is
 How do I get  Windows to recognize the 80  gb .

help would be appreciated ... thanks

Answer : Problem: Western Digital Caviar SE sata 80gb harddrive  having trouble installing xp

i take it the original 20 gig was a regular ata (ribbon cable) drive?

in order to install windows onto the sata drive connected to the on-board sata controller, you'll need drivers for the controller on floppy.

if the motherboard was a component purchase (or was a 'built' system from a small shop), you should have a floppy disk that has the drivers on it..

otherwise check the drivers cd that came with the motherboard for the drivers and instructions on how to move them to a floppy.

you could also download them from asus at http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/ide/via/VIARAID220d.zip (it is a 7mb download as it has drivers for all windows versions)

unzip this file to a folder, then copy the contents of the 'sata' folder that's inside the 'driverdisk' folder (viaraid\driverdisk\sata) to a blank floppy. the root of that floppy should have five folders and 2 files.

when windows xp setup prompts you to hit f6 to to install drivers, do it and then follow the on screen prompts (it's during the setup loading process, before you actually do any of the installation steps).

see the readme that's included in the driver zip file for more info.