Russ may have hit upon the possible problem. Windows XP does not natively
support AHCI - on my own system, I did load the necessary drivers to use
AHCI, but once I had to do an OS reinstall and forgot about the AHCI. The
system would not boot.

Since you say the SATA and AHCI settings are grayed out in your CMOS
configuration, I might suggest that you ask the BIOS to reset the
configurations to DEFALULT and try installing the OS on the disk again.
Seems that you already checked out all the hardware as being ok.

Good luck and keep us posted.


p.s. I am not aware of a floppy that connects to the IDE unless it is a ZIP
drive.
-----Original Message-----
Tried hooking up a floppy via a spare IDE connection, but the computer 
wouldn't recognise it.  Duh again! Up creek, no paddles.

Thx to everyone who has offered help on this, I now have a few more options 
to try out. This BIOS seems to offer very few options. To make matters 
worse, the HD options I want to get to (SATA, AHCI) are greyed out and 
seemingly inaccessible.

Don Penlington

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