Installing windows 8 assistance

[fusil]

I've just got my computer to boot, but I am now struggling to install windows 8. I get to the screen where it asks me to select a drive to install windows on and I see my hdd. It will not let me install it onto the drive however. I have a feeling that it's because I have the wrong driver. I put this* driver on a usb and plugged it into the machine, but it says that it can't detect any driver updaters. Help?

The driver:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223651en
The HDD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840

 

[The_Prophecy]

You are confusing drivers with firmware. Hard drive firmware could be considered the equivalent of a motherboard's BIOS. A driver on the other hand tells an operating system (Windows in your case) how to interact with a piece of hardware. In simple terms, Firmware tells a device how to work, drivers tell an operating system how to work with a device once the device itself knows how to operate.

Right now I can think of 2 possibilities here:

1. You are trying to install Windows 8 from a flash drive plugged into a USB 3.0 port. Some third party USB 3.0 controllers will boot a Windows install flash drive ok, but won't let you carry out the install because they lack the proper access to the drive (even if they can see it, they may not be able to write to it). In this case, switch the flash drive over to a USB 2.0 port and you should be able to run it without issue (although it will be slower, it should actually work).

2. You are missing updated drivers for the SATA controller on the motherboard (hard drives themselves don't need drivers as far as the OS install environment is concerned. They are either already included or are not required). Check your motherboard manufacturer's website for updated SATA controller drivers, or in some cases, standard chipset drivers will do. Maybe grab both to be sure, and also make sure you extract them first. The Windows installer environment cannot pull drivers from within ZIP files. It must have direct access to them.