I am not having fun installing Vista on my new computer.

[Xarzu]

I am not having fun installing Vista on my new computer.

At first, I did not touch any of the BIOS settings.

The Install program recognized my hardware but said it was 698.6 GB which is a bit too small. There was a warning that said, "This computer's hardware may not support booting to this hard disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu".

I ignored this message and I clicked on this item in the list that showed my hard drive. There are little icon buttons at the bottom of the window. Few are enabled. One that is enabled is one that showed the "new" option. I clicked on that and an error appeared: "Failed to create a new partition on the selected used space. [Error: 0x80042453]". So I guess "new" is not the option to click on.

I went into the BIOS settings.

There were two things I noticed to change. One was SATA AHC MODE which I switched to [AHCI]. The other was "SATA PORT 0-1 Native Mode" which I switched to [ENABLED].

Then I ran through the Vista Setup again. This time, when I got to the display for my hard drive, the list box was empty. It did not recognize that I even had a hard drive.

Maybe it needs a driver.

I have a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

This is what comes up on Western Digital's Website:
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/Athono/hard_drive.jpg

I downloaded a few zip files that I thought were applicable. But none of the readme files mentioned Vista. Are XP drivers the same as VISTA?

[cesium]

698.6GB is the right size for a 750GB hard drive. This is because the OS reads in gigabytes, while the drive is listed in gigabits

Is there an option to format the hard drive first? That might do it

The only driver you'd need is for your SATA controller, and not the hard drive. In fact, I don't think hard drive drivers exist (not guaranteed to be 100% true :P)

[Xarzu]

698.6GB is the right size for a 750GB hard drive. This is because the OS reads in gigabytes, while the drive is listed in gigabits

Is there an option to format the hard drive first? That might do it

The only driver you'd need is for your SATA controller, and not the hard drive. In fact, I don't think hard drive drivers exist (not guaranteed to be 100% true :P)


The option to format the hard drive is disabled.

Do you mean the "SIIG Serial ATA Controller Card Driver" or the "WD Serial ATA RAID Controller Card Driver"

[Olin Coles]

698.6GB is the right size for a 750GB hard drive. This is because the OS reads in gigabytes, while the drive is listed in gigabits

Is there an option to format the hard drive first? That might do it

The only driver you'd need is for your SATA controller, and not the hard drive. In fact, I don't think hard drive drivers exist (not guaranteed to be 100% true :P)

That's not true actually. The real reason BIOS and OS do not see your 750GB hard drive is because a true gigabyte is 1024 MB, but the industry uses a metric measurment and rounds it to 1000 (such as in the kilo- byte).

[cesium]

Ah, thanks for clearing that up.

The driver would be for whatever controllers' ports your drive is plugged into.