I just inherited an a7n8x-e from a friend. I had to do a clean install (xp pro), and decided to go with 2 seagate SATA drives, one for data one for my OS. (160gb/80gb).
The install worked fine (I had to do the ‘press F6’ thing during windows text install and have the SATA controllers from my driver CD on a floppy), but the installation went through ok and the computer was booting fine.
I’ve been able to install all my programs and windows updates etc, and the PC restarts very quickly during all these processes.
However… if the power has been off for a while, the next time I go to boot, no drives are recognised, and after all the DMI pool stuff it tells me I have a system error. I’ve tried getting into the BIOS to see if I can stop the machine from doing a drive auto-detect (currently it’s looking to boot from CD first), but once in there I noticed it could’nt see my SATA drives at all, and to be honest I don’t know too much about BIOS settings.
If I hit the reboot button then XP eventually crunches into action (it recognises the disks second time round) and loads very slowly, but it’s like the power supply to the disk is halting, or it’s spinning sporadically (load…pause…load…pause etc) and sometimes chckdisk runs. This is starting to alarm me because this is the second Seagate 80gb disk I’m trying to do this on (I tried this about 2 weeks ago with another disk which I have since had to replace due to complete failure). Am I doing anything wrong? How can I get BIOS to recognise my disks? What should my settings be? I should be able to boot the OS from a SATA disk, is that correct? If someone could walk me through a basic checkpoint process I’d be very grateful!