Bios recognizes hard drive but windows wont install

[govtofficial]

I'm running a pc with a 975xbx board and an e6600 that has worked fine for 2 years plus. A couple months ago i replaced my computer case, power supply, and got some new storage hard drives, but my RAM, mobo, cpu, and optical drives stayed the same.

I was running windows xp fine for this whole time....and then a couple days ago as I was surfing the web, the computer just shut off spontaneously. no warning, no nothing, just black screen and the computer was off.

Now, when I start up, I'll get to the windows startup logo before I get a 0x00000007e blue screen crash.

In BIOS, my hard drives, RAM, etc are picked up fine. Just for kicks i moved some ram around, dropped to one stick, unhooked the optical drives, yet the problem persists.

Now, if i throw in my windows xp install CD and try to repair or just reinstall, it doesn't find the drive at all. but the bios does....

If i take a new formatted hard drive and insert it, the xp install again doesnt find it.

I have 2 raid controllers on my intel board, and the floppy disks for both, but when I boot the raid controller screens pop up fine and recognize drives prior to the windows logo. If i throw my install CD in, however, and hit F6 to go to the raid controller install, the xp cd can't seem to read my floppy disks, as if they aren't even there. but the floppy drive light is on, powered, and the cables are plugged in.

This is just really confusing, as if my computer just doesn't read anything but the CD drive.

I'm at a loss. I'm willing to just do a clean install of windows on a formatted hard drive, but the windows CD install program won't detect the new drive (it is low-level formatted).

I'm using XP professional and it's a full install CD, not just recovery.

any ideas?

PS - If i pull my hard drive and load it on an external hard drive case, my laptop reads everything on the boot drive fine. Furthermore, a virus scan and malware scan come out clean for it.

 

[TheViper]

XP doesn't have native SATA drivers. Meaning it doesn't know your SATA devices exist.

Get the SATA drivers from your motherboard manufacturers web site and put them on a floppy. I know your have trouble reading the RAID driver floppy but try the SATA driver floppy. Or is your floppy drive connected via SATA? If so, use the old connector instead.

If all that doesn't work or isn't possible, slipstream the drivers into your disc.
Follow the instructions here.

 

[Zoron]

It's also possible that your floppy disks are bad... one thing I've noticed lately is that floppy disks are extremely unreliable nowadays. You might also try cleaning the drive with an air duster or a cleaning disk if you have one. So glad that Vista and 7 have the option to read drivers from a USB key instead of relying on floppies.

Slipstreaming the drivers into the install is a very good idea... this eliminates the need for floppies. I highly recommend that you do this if you plan on keeping XP around.