My old IDE drive crashed on my Dell Demension 300 so I replaced it with an SATA drive. I installed the drive and am trying to install windows XP. When I start the installation I press F6 and load the SATA controller drivers for the PCI card. I format the drive and start the installation. When it is finished compying the files, the computer needs to restart, when it restart it starts the installation over from scratch. If i remove the windows installation CD it does not find my drive. How do i fix this, or is there anyway to keep the controller drivers loaded into memory?
When it was restarting, did you hit a key when the message came up to press any key to boot from the CD? If XP is in the install process, you don't hit a key to boot from the CD. It goes back to continuing the install on its own.
No, i don't press anything. I've even tried taking the CD out, when I do that I get an error message telling me to "Press F1 to retry boot, press F2 to enter setup." Then it goes no further.
there is no dell dimension 300 but there is a dimension 3000 so which is it? did you install a pci sata controller card?
oops, that was a typo, it is a 3000. Yeah I've installed a PCI controller. When I install windows I press F6 i load the driver for the PCI card, it finds, my hard drive, but when setup reboots,it can no longer find it, the windows setup starts over from the very begining. The files the windows setup copied are on the drive, I can access it from the windows recovery console, but my cmoputer just cant see it before it loads windows. I am stumped, I have no idea what to do.
need to enable sata in bios possibly sata native as it is trying to find an ide drive to continue the setup with
