PCTech Forums

Hi mateys.


Ive just recently bought a brand spanking new PC, and am relatively happy with it. However, Ive just put a 80Gig Maxtor SATA drive in it and something seems to be wrong. System Spec:

AMD Athlon 64 3400+ With Asus Cooling System.
Asus Ati Radeon 9800 XT
The new 80Gig HDD (Previously had a 40Gig IDE one, which must have been faulty as it took ages to find any files)
1 Gig of RAM.
Can find out the Mobo if needs be... but the box might be hiding somewhere.

The thing is I can play top end games on High settings (Doom 3 etc) but the whole system jsut doesnt feel right. For a 64 Bit Processor I must admit i was expecting a lot more, expecially with the G-card & RAM.

Anyway, last night when trying to restart the PC it got stuck on startup, having restarted a number of times and it getting stuck in the same place I thought it must be a OS problem, so in goes my Windows CD and Im trying to go Over the Top of my old System. However, when I enter the setup im confronted with a message saying that my PC doesnt actually ahve a Hard Drive, and that I should install one. Now Im not entirely sure how to set up SATA drives so I did get a friend to do it, Im just not convinced he knew exactly what he was doing. Ive enabled SATA thingymebob in the BIOS. The only thing that I can see is that in the BIOS the first thing its booting from seems to be the CD drive. Im guessing you're needing a lot more system info but its a bit tricky to get all the intracacies when i cant actually access the computer lol. If you guys just lemme know what you need, and what I need to do I'll try and get all the relevant info

Thanks for any help
Regards

Boro

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.

These need to be taken off of the motherboard cd or downloaded from the Manufacturer's web site onto a floppy.

Copy the drivers from motherboard CD --(Your looking for a SATA directory)
Copy just the files from that directory onto the floppy disk.
disk should contain \pide and \sata folders, txtsetup.oem, etc. files.)

Then, boot with the Windows XP installation CD, Watch carefully here,
if you have a fast system this will go by very quick.
You'll see the words "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver"
Press "F6". Then, press "S" to specify additional device
when next screen pops up.
Make sure the floppy disk you made is in the A drive.
Press enter to continue.
Then select Serial ATA RAID Controller ,and you should be on your way.
XP should see the drive

You're a dude

Sorry for the late reply lol.


One other issue i am having now however is:

Ive got a ATi Radeon 9800XT which has been tweaked this way and that (dont ask which way or how ), and coupled with a Gig of RAM and a 64 bit processor, it should run Doom 3 with no problems, agreed?

However, when im running it on 'High' settings, or normal ones for that matter, i get pixel snow really bad. I have downloaded the latest catalyst for the card and done everything i can think of. Any ideas?

Boro