Okay so 3 days of beating my head on the wall I got win 7 installed.
Day 1 involved several hours trying to get it to work without the raid driver disk. No dice.
I tried all 6 SATA ports among various settings in the bios, except raid as I had it disabled.
Day 2 involved the win 7 32 bit driver file from gigabytes website. no dice
I started reading some posts about fixing os installs, one said to default bios with fail safe, then load optimal. So with a freshly defaulted bios settings. I had resigned myself to installing the drive as a raid item since in non raid modes win7 wouldn't see it. This was a brand new 80g Sata drive.
At 2am on day 2, well technically it was day 3 at that point. success!
Okay so here's what I did.
Note: my prior setup involved 2 Sata drives and 2 IDE drives, i booted off the IDE's and so never needed the raid driver or even messed with raid settings. The drives were in single mode and the raid disabled.
wired sata drive to slot channel 4
enabled raid mode
disabled normal ide channel (done with ide hdd's)
changed drive from IDE mode to SATA mode
Save & exit
In raid menu - the first gotcha was system auto created the drive as a JBOD - doesn't work, need 2 drives according to raid bios. delete the drives listed and created a new "Raid 0/1 raid ready" drive.
Save & exit
From there windows came up saw it, just for erring on the side of caution, I format the drive from the installer. I made a 100meg sys partition and allocated the rest.
From there I went to bed. Woke up, plugged in my user name, network and within a minute was at the desktop. When the install works, it is nice & smooth.
I can post exact bios settings if someone asks. But I'm at work and going off memory from 2am and writing this off baring any interest in the entry.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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