I had recently purchased parts to build a new PC and had encountered a Dicken’s of a time getting it to install at all. Now here’s the whacked out part: I followed the advice from online that Intel recommends I set the BIOS to RAID versus leaving it at SATA. This is because once the OS is installed, it can’t be changed without blue screens of death.

After selecting RAID, I tried to install Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit. It won’t recognize the SATA drives. It sees them, even formats them. But won’t install to them.

When I put in a PATA drive, Vista all of the sudden let’s me install onto the SATA drives. But when I remove the PATA drive, Vista doesn’t recognize the SATA’s again. I wound up installing Vista on the PATA and using the SATA as program and data drives, respectively.

Parts:

Motherboard: ECS Elitegoup’s GF7100PVT-M3 with built-in nVidia 7100 VGA/DVI 256meg video.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M
RAM: 2x G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 PC2 6400 (4 gig total)
HD: 2x 500gig Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS SATA II drives
DVD-R/W: Lite-On LH-20A1S SATA