SerenityRee

Hi, I am not very experienced but found this at the Micrsoft Vista Solution Center. You may have already read it but as nobody has gotten back to you yet I thougt I would offer it out to you. You can read it here. The link above is in regards to an unnattended OS install, but it may help you with your search for an answer. Good luck. Serenity

First, I am very new builder, and am not extremely experienced. However, yesterday I attempted the instructions in that KB article and my system would not boot. I received the black screen. I went back in and reset the SATA mode to IDE, booted, received a error report, and then booted normally. My situation is that after building the system, and upon installing Vista Ultimate I failed to use the "add additional drivers" to load the SATA driver(s) needed to enable AHCI Mode. (I didn't know I was suppose to. ) Vista installed without issue, recognizing the HDD, and I had no idea it was in IDE Mode until I went into the bios. I refrained from changing the Mode to AHCI until I researched the setting (It is not explained in the ASUS manual), and found out if I had done so my system would not have booted. I read the XP Thread on changing this without the need of reinstallation, but have not found any such instructions for Vista. The XP thread does say that Vista handles SATA natively, but I am unsure what that means. If it means it automatically loads SATA drivers, then it didn't in my system. Here is the thread I read. If anyone has any suggestions if I did something wrong I would appreciate hearing from them. I did follow the instructions to the letter, or so I believe. I am very new to system building. Serenity

Hi all, I am brand new to MSFN and am very pleased to be included. Of all the forums I have participated in this is by far the most professional and helpful. I am new to computer technology, only been learning for three years now. I have not received any formal education, (except an Introduction to Microcomputers way back in 1994!) and have taught myself what little I know today. I dragged my husband into building a couple of systems and have learned a lot. We built a light system to house Windows Home Server, and most recently finally built my Vista Ultimate machine. We shopped sales and slowly compiled all the parts. After shopping for nearly eight months we finally bought the video card and got to the task of building. We made a huge mistake in not adding the "additional" SATA drivers and so our nice SATA disk is running in IDE mode and we will have to reinstall in order to change that setting and enable all the advanced features that AHCI offers. We are puzzled as to why a SATA disk would load as IDE, not SATA, and be required to add SATA drivers when we didn't have to add IDE drivers. Oh well, live and learn. Anyway, I look forward to learning a lot from all the experts in this forum. Good Online resources and advice can be hard to come by, so I am thrilled to find MSFN. I have sifted through tons of information on the Internet, never knowing if the information is valid, and having to spend countless hours attempting to verify prior to actually implementing. Please have patience with what will soon be my incessant questions! I have a quizzical mind and one idea leads to another and so forth and so on. I also have a tendency to talk too much, but I will attempt to keep to the point. Hello all, and again, thanks to everyone for this forum and allowing me to participate. Serenity

My husband and I are new system builders. Our first experience was with Windows Home Server, which was in a very basic hardware configuration. Anyway, our specs are an ASUS motherboard PK5-E/WiFi-AP, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghtz, 2 gigbyte (adding more soon) 300 gigabyte SATA hard disk, ATI HD 2600 Pro video card, Creative SB X-Fi HD sound card, Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabyte Ethernet Controller, Realtek RTL8187 802.11b/g USB 2.0 Wireless Network Adapter, flopy disk drive, Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111C ATA disk drive, Agere OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394FireWire and other goodies just for starters, with a Antec 500 Watt PS, and an Antec case which rocks. In our humble and inexperienced opinions anyway. lol We installed Vista Ultimate about a month ago, and then installed SP1 two weeks later. I must say that the system does seem snappier with SPI than without. I fully understand most of the fixes in SP1 are under the hood, and have read up on what they are and what they fix. Our installation went smooth and completed in under fifteen minutes. I think this is mostly due to the fact our Vista installation was so new. Not a lot had been added to the system, so there wasn't a lot to work around. Everything runs fine, not a single hitch. I have spent a great deal of time getting to know Vista Ultimate. I think Vista is a huge improvement over XP Pro. This system almost takes care of itself. I like the Problem Reports and Solutions, the revamped Event Viewer and Proformance utilities, and even the UAC is worthy of getting use to working with. My only complaint is I believe Vista should enable SATA without having to go through the hassle of "adding additional drivers". Due to our newness, we did not know we needed to add those drivers and so our SATA hard disk is actually running as IDE, and can only be changed by a full reinstallation. Thanks for starting this thread, this is my very first post in this group. This topic is a good way for me to get my feet wet here. I found the group through pure chance, and hope to receive some help on the SATA driver installation. SerenityRee