Hi all

I have 2 IDE hard drives and now I want to add a 250GB Seagate SATA
drive and make this my boot drive with a fresh windows install and use
my older IDE drives as additional storage. In the past week I have been
unable to setup xp on that sata. I boot pc from windows xp home cd, then
when prompted, I press F6 to install third party RAID drivers. After
installing  RAID drivers(I tried all of them in the list, RAID as well
as AHCI, ICH7, ICH6, ICH5,...) setup continues loading files and after
that...I get a blue screen with an error message (code 0x0000007B) that
says that xp is shut down to avoid damage and that I should try chkdsk
or virusscan, blabla...

*I tried xp  sp1a
*I made an xp with sp2 cd (slipstreamed or whatever you call it)
*I tried xp professional sp1
*I used RAID drivers from my motherboard CD
*I used RAID drivers from ASUS website
*I updated my BIOS successfully to latest version
*I tried booting without and with my old IDE drives connected
*I tried port SATA1 as well as SATA2

And it all gave the same error message.

The strange thing is that when I boot normally from my old IDE drive, in
windows my sata drive appears in disc management as a non-partitioned
drive. So it is recognised.

In device manager I cannot see any RAID or AHCI entry, which is strange
because the F6 RAID floppy utility readme file says the following about
this: "Your system does not appear to be running in RAID or
    AHCI mode. If you feel that your system is running in
    RAID or AHCI mode and you do not see any of the
    controllers listed above, you may choose to contact
    your system manufacturer or place of purchase for
    assistance"

I thought of partitioning and formatting the sata when booted from my
old IDE to windows but then my sata will get drive letter G:\ and I have
a horrible feeling that I won't be able to change that to C:\ afterwards
to make the sata the (primary)boot drive(?)

Is there any other way to get Bully Gates' OS to setup on this SATA??

Any help is much appreciated.

Alex

Intel P4 775socket
windows xp home sp2 32bit
ASUS P5LD2 mobo