NF4 sata issues

[drakus]

I am trying to work on my brother in law's pc and having some difficulties. He currently is running two raptor drives in raid mode. The drives are on the fringes and he wants to replace them with a single 500gb sata drive. I cannot get windows to install for the life of me. I know that the nf4 chipsets are notorious for sata issues, just wondering if anyone else has run into this.

I boot the pc with the windows xp disk in the optical drive.
It goes though it initial setup
It recognizes the drive. I select the drive for windows installation. I choose to format the drive. (tried fast and slow option.)
It formats the drive, copies the files and reboots the pc.
On the next boot it gives the error "Error Loading operating system"

I really am dumbfounded at this point.:shrug: I have tried everything I know to do. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[zanzabar]

change the controller from asci to ide mode

[drakus]

Thanks for the fast response. Unfortunately, I cannot see anywhere in the bios where I am able to change the controller mode to IDE. I did however in my search, find where I could disable DMA transfer mode. Or is that the same thing? Anyways, this got me further in the process. It went into the actual installation process, but part-way through it blue screened me. I rebooted and it took off from where it crashed. It is still going now, so we'll see in a few minutes......

[zanzabar]

try dloading the latest drivers and install them with f6 from a floppy

[drakus]

I tried that actually. It gave me a message that the drivers I was trying to install were older than the ones on the windows disk. I selected to install the older ones anyways. But then I got an error later on in the installation so I couldn't use them.
The pc is running now (knock on wood). I just hope it stays that way. I am concerned that disabling DMA mode will hurt the drive performance though. And I still don't really understand why that should make it work.:shrug:

[Lloyd]

which BIOS is it? Pheonix or AMI? will help norrow down where the actual IDE, RAID, AHCI settings are
And what motherboard is it?

[drakus]

The board is an Asus A8N-SLI premium. didn't pay attention to which bios it was unfortunately. After disabling DMA transfer, it seems to be working. I was so tired when we finally got windows installed that I just went home. He has been using it all day today without issues though. :)

We'll just have to wait and see I guess. Thanks very much for the response though. They were greatly appreciated.:yepp:

[Lloyd]

I seem to remember on my A8N32-SLI (and on my Asus MSN32 SLI, Crosshair etc) i had to select RAID and then select ports to be included in the array, and leave the other diabled and they'll act as IDE drives.
Then just make sure you don't have the array plugged in and install xp on the 80GB drive, install the nforce driver and then you can plug the array back in i believe - sorry never done it that way round