Vista doesn't like me

Well I got all of my parts and put everything together. I am getting hung up on the vista installation.


My mobo is GA-P35-DS3L
2 hdd Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Right after I put in my cd key in it goes to the screen on what drive you want to install it. Says some crap like can't find a drive to install it on.


I tried clicking new and then formating the drive (not sure it actually does anything as it gets done in ~15 seconds)

I tried going to load a driver. Wasn't able to find anything on the vista disk. Having a hard time trying to find the actual driver on the web also.

After some searching I found that one guy had a similar problem. His solution was try a bunch of crap. Then he realized his dvd driver was on sata0 not his harddrive. So he swapped them and everything worked. I tried that also. No luck.

Any thoughts/advice?

Well I slept on it and did a little more searching. The only hints that I can give someone if they run across this type of problem is the following.

1) make sure your SATA connections are on the lowest possible connections (ie the first ones on the board. Orginally I had the dvd drive on SATA0)
2) In my bios I had to enable SATA native mode
3) if you are using a usb keyboard make sure you enable that in the bios

It looks like Vista wants to install now!! Finally got to a new screen. It is kind of frustrating I don't think I did anything different this time.I changed the bios settings to allow a usb mouse/keyboard

The problem is Vista doesn't have a driver for your SATA controller in AHCI mode during install. There are 2 solutions: provide one with the 'Load Driver' feature during installation, or to disable AHCI mode and install. Then you can update your drivers and switch back to AHCI mode for the extra features it provides (hot pluggable drives, NCQ, some other stuff). But there's also a couple of hotfixes you will need to install as well otherwise your machine will just not boot. Not sure if they are in Vista SP1, a quick google should find them for you.