Building new machine with Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI and two Western Digital SATA2 WD1600JS and win xp sp2. All brand new. Here is what happens.1. Drives connected to the sata2 ports on the mb. Bios will see both drives.2. Xp install starts, and loads the sata2 drivers from floppy. Sata2 driver is from the Gigabyte CD, driver SILxxx (forget exactly).3. Driver loads, win sees the drives and I can format it.4. After formatting, win copies the install files to the drive, and then reboots.5. After rebooting, the install process should start

Ha! I was also stumped when that happened. But don't dispair, there is a way out: Send me 1000 bucks and I'll tell ya da secret! :-) No kidding, if you get to see the second boot screen, you'll see your HD is recognized as CHS instead of LBH. Once this has happened and you formatted the drive, you'll first of all need to remove any partition(s) you created and make sure the drive is in a virgin state again. Then, on the back of your drive, you'll find a pair of pins where one is meant to avoid the drive from going into S-ATA-2 mode. Jumper those pins, install the OS and afterwards simply remove the jumper and you'll be fine. Hope this helps, good luck and kind regards Jaap

Thanks for the info. I'll try it when I get home from work... From the descriptions of the jumper settings on this drive, I assume what you are talking about is the setting to revert back to a 150mb/s? Interesting to note. Look at option 1 and 2. Unless you knew how the drive was shipped, you would have no idea if the jumper meant spread spectrum was enabled or disabled! Not that it would matter anyway

Yep, absolutely right, you'll need to revert to 150MB/s to install the OS. I don't know whether this is mainboard chipset specific, but it seems to happen on many a platform. I hope you have a jumper handy because WD-drives usually come without (Default 1). On a general note, Hitachi ships their SATA-2 drives in SATA-1 mode by default to avoid this kind of trouble and SATA-2 can be enabled later on thru software. Don't know about Samsungs.. yet! :-) AIM, just make sure you wipe the drive before you proceed, otherwise it won't work. Wishing you good luck, kind regards Jaap

Nope, didn't work. :( Installed jumper, deleted partition(s) reformated (the slow version) started the installation, read driver from cd, copied windows files to hd, removed floppy so win could restart didnt see hd and wanted to install fresh again...

Ok, finally got it to work. I was actually in the ball park yesterday with the solution but missed one step. The fix had nothing to do with jumpers. (Thanks for the help however) The actual problem was I needed to disable RAID mode for the sli chipset. Not in the motherboard bios, which by the was has an option for doing that. (Adds to the confusion). But I had to select jbod mode for a single raid drive in the raid configuration utility which is accessed during startup. I did that yesterday but when win rebooted it said there was a hard drive configuration error. What I did today that I didn

That's good news. Glad you got it working and thanks a lot for the feedback. Being a curious person; did you install the OS with the jumper on or off again? I'm asking, becuase on my end, SATA-2 would always default the HD to CHS mode instead of LBH (no raid etc involved). Computers are 'interesting' sometimes, aren't they?!? Thanks and kind regards Jaap

I installed the OS with out the jumper. Regards

Hmmm, could be a mainboard issue (bios?). Sincerely stumped as well now. I'll return the 1000 bucks asap :-) Thanks and kind regards Jaap

I'm no longer stumped other that the fact that I don't fully understand the technical reasons behind all of this. The SATA2 ports were set to a raid configuration. After POST, you can select del to enter the mother board bios, or f4 to enter the sil chip set bios. The sli chip set controls the sata2 ports. I had to select the sata2 to ports to jbod mode which is the setting for a single drive. I assume it means a single raid drive or something because I actually have two drives. One on sata2 port 0 and 1. Jbod is supposed to let you combine multiple disks into a single volume. I don't think that is what I have as I have C: as hd #1 and D: as hd #2. (CD rom is on the isa port as device d: So, not really sure what's going on. It works, don't know if it really transfers 300mb/s or if it's slower than anything else: But I did get the red cable connected to the red port on the mother board. That was my goal :)That's about as far as I can go in the explanation. ;) Cheers!

Well, I'm a mule when it comes to raid volumes etc. ;-) But you're right you shouldn't be seeing multiple volumes when it's supposed to be one. Maybe somebody else can jump in? Even more stumped now... kind regards Jaap