MY last hope installing Windows on SATA HDFollow

I know Sata has been around awhile but this is my first experience trying to install a SATA hard drive. SO I have a ECS Nforce6100sm-M motherboard. It has 2 Built in Sata ports. So I bought a 320 g Western Digital Sata Hard Drive. My plan is to take the current IDE 160g HD that I have and put it in my other computer since my other computers HD quit working all together. Also this HD comes with no boot disk or any cd of any kind which I found odd since my Maxtor had partitioning software with it.

So when I put this drive in I can see that my bios detects a 320 g hard drive. I put Windows 7 disc and it boots up like it is starting to install. It shows the animation of the Windows Logo then loads the next screen which is blank and just quits. I can move the mouse around but it acts like it is loading yet the dvd-rom and HD are silent. I waited several minutes and nothing ever happened. Can't alt ctrl del or anything other then reset or power off.

Just for the heck of it I tried booting it up with Windows XP. It loads up and then tells me there is no Hard disk present and puts me to a command prompt.

I put my old IDE hard drive back in and it boots into Windows 7 just fine. Through Windows 7 I find, partition, and format the 320 gig HD. The HD works fine I can copy files to and from it etc with no problems.

So once again I shut the PC off, remove the ide drive and try to install Windows 7 on the SATA drive. Same thing happens.

This time I call Western Digital tech support just to see if they can help me. OF course I get a hold of somebody who can't speak English very well. After a long drawn out conversation about my contact info and other useless crap he tells me he can't help me because I have to contact my computer manufacture and get SATA drivers from them to boot into. So I go to ECS.com and look up my MB and i see all kinds of drivers dated back in 2008 that have nothing to do with SATA except for one. I download the SATA drivers and they are just drivers to install SATA drives on vista (after the OS is installed apparently). So alot of good that will do. So I contact ECS and they tell me they can't help I must contact Western Digital, which of course I all ready did.

So finally I call Best Buy and get a hold of one of there Geeksquad guys. This guy is trying to tell me because its a fresh install I have to have the full version of Windows 7 and that the upgrade can not be installed on a hard drive unless its upgrading a previous OS. Now WTF I know he is full of crap. I have never heard such an outlandish claim ever, and this guy is paid to do computer repair? The only thing the upgrade does is forces you to show proof you have the previous version of the software. When I installed Windows 7 on my previous drive it was a fresh install, I just had to show my XP disk at one point is all. I told him this and he just told me if I didn't like his answer to bring it into the store and pay them to install my OS.

So I am back to square one. Surely there is something simple I am overlooking? I am about to the point of just taking the HD back and telling them to stick it. I am glad this new technology is so much easier to use then IDE.

There could be a couple issues here. Windows 7 does have a few features that some motherboards out there cannot handle without a bios upgrade. The P5W-DH asus board for one. Yours might be a similar situation. it may be installed correctly, but the machine can't boot because of the bios issue. check for and updated motherboard bios, and then see if you can boot it. Updating a motherboard bios is an advanced task, so read up on it before you attempt, and know that if it goes wrong it can require you to get a new bios chip or in some cases a new motherboard.

If that doesn't do the trick, it might be a bios setting. The nforce chipset supports several different possible sata drive technologies, including RAID and AHCI (advanced hardware configuration interface). IT may not boot correctly if you have the controller set to raid mode. Try seeing if there is an option inthe bios for either AHCI, or IDE compliant mode, or somethign along those lines.

Then make sure your boot order is correct. Ensure that your sata drive is set as the primary boot hard drive, and that none of your other drives, except maybe the floppy if you ahve one, and the DVD drive are set to boot before it.

If all that doesn't work, then there are still a few other things to try.

The problem with the invalid code is due to the Windows 7 installer looking for a previous copy of XP or Vista since it's the upgrade version. You need to just install one of those 2 to the disk, then run the Windows 7 boot again. You won't need to activate the old OS.

The id I have to enter is pretty much standard since Windows 95 as far as I know. I am not talking about activating the software over the internet. I am talking about the part where you have to enter a cd-key. Even when I installed Windows 7 before it asked for this and I didn't have a previous copy of Windows XP installed.

Well I tried again and just didn't put any code at all in the box and it installed just fine. IT isn't even asking me to activate it.

Times like this that makes me feel really old. I still don't know why it frooze 10 minutes or more when I first tried to install Windows 7 on this drive but in any case it seems to be working fine.

Appreciate the help though. Time to go find all my stuff and install it... again.