I have an ABIT AV8 motherboard. I am currently using an IDE main drive on the system, and everything works fine. I want to add another drive, which is SATA. I had one drive, an 80GB Samsung, and it wouldn't work right, wouldn't spin up and would not be detected. I thought there was something wrong with the drive, so I took it back and got a SATA 80GB Western Digital WD800. I have it connected up to power and an SATA slot on the motherboard. It spins up, but it is not being detected by the bios or Windows XP, just as the other one was. I am wondering what I can do to fix this. Any help is very much appreciated!

Also, if I disconnect the IDE drive and boot with just the SATA drive in, it still isn't being detected.

Are you looking in the main BIOS setup or in a separate SATA/RAID setup (usually reached by a key/key-combination indicated by an early display on your monitor).

In order for WinXP to detect it you must press F6 early on in the setup (watch the bottom of the blue, with silver text, screen for the prompt) and then have the SATA/RAID drivers ready ON A FLOPPY DISKETTE to insert when prompted.

Ok, I didn't know about the F6 thing. I'm new with using SATA drives. How do I get the SATA/RAID drivers?

In the device manager in Windows, it was showing VIA SATA Raid controller with an exclamation point over it. It says it cannot start. I uninstalled the driver, then rebooted, and Windows detected this hardware again. I installed the drivers from the CD and rebooted once more. Still, same thing, with an exclamation point.

You should be able to get the chipset and sata drivers from:
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/drivers.php?categories=1&model=175

BTW - Have you found how to get into the Mobo Controllers BIOS setup?

I found how to get into the SATA setup and all of that in bios. But it doesn't detect any drives.

But it doesn't detect any drives.
That sounds like, bad connection or cables, bad hard drive or bad mobo.

Hi matt, hi all at pcguide,
I've just registred after reading about your problem, and i have exactly the same problem, same motherboard, and the harddrive works fine, came off my old PC, and went back when i needed data from it?!,
Its an interesting problem as it did work, just once, then i rebooted and i've never seen it since, when i was installing windows the drivers disk didnt work, the files were there(apparently this is a common problem),
I get the same issues with the VIA SATA RAID in device manager, i cannot update the driver to the one supplied by abit, when i select the drive location it doenst find anything, and i've unpacked the .EXE and offered the driver files to it on a plate, still does'nt agree,
my next idea is to find out the difference between the AV8 and the AV8-3rd-eye, might be getting the basics mixed up,

i know mine was probably one of the very first to roll off the production line as is my proccessor which is an AMD64 X2 4400+ but its unmarked just says AMD 4400, the person who i bought this off is the kind of person who buys the latest greatest things as soon as they come out,
I'll post if i get anywhere with anything, might just be a problem abit swept under the matt on very early production models

Hi,
I have the same problem Samsung SATA drive not detected.

System config says that the Raid driver is loaded.

Not tried the F6 option though because I thought that was just for RAID?