Hello all, I've got a HP Pavilion a1514n that I am having trouble with... The BIOS recognizes the Sata HDD, and XP seems to during the XP setup, but after XP formats the HDD and copies the setup files to it, the PC restarts (as it should), but then nothing will load off the HDD - it just restarts. It is still visible in the BIOS. So, I loaded the SATA drivers onto a floppy (even though XP was able to see the drive before) just to see if it would make a difference, but nothing. Any suggestions? It is a WD HDD...
try this: Put the floppy with the drivers. Put the xp cd-rom. put the booting priority to the CDrom. Then start everything, but instead of installing, look for the repair console (i think it was F4). When you're there put the command "chkdsk/r" (i don't remember if there it was a space before the slash). That should work. I had the same problem but still had to send my pc to a better guy since something was very wrong, but usually that's the case. I don't know what's the deal with SATA hard drives but i find them awful.