Home-Built and HDD's Not Recognized

[midwestjim7]

Very carefully put together my first 'home-built' PC
Antec Sonata III
Intel D975XBX2
Intel C2Duo 6600
EVGA 8600GTS
(2) 1 GB DDR2 PNY RAM
Sony FDD
Silverstone Media Reader
(2) LiteOn LH-20A1L06 DVD Writers
(2) Samsung 500GB HD501LJ SATA Hard Drives - OEM

After putting it all together I moved the BIOS jumper to 'confgurure', let it configure, moved it back, and let the system boot to the Vista Home Premium CD. Got only part way thru the Vista install and was asked for drivers. was never able to get beyond, nor can I now get back this far. BIOS was set to enable RAID 0, and with CTRL-I I can see that RAID shows about 930 GB. But when hitting the power button, the system keeps looking for a bootable device, and can find none. The 2 optical drives also appear to NOT be recognized, although they DO appear in the BIOS screen. In other words, they are there, but not "use-able"(???) The BIOS screen for floppy also has no menu, so I'm not sure the system recognizes the floppy, either. Never have built a PC from scratch before, but have been messing with commercially-built units for almost 15 years. I'm missing something - but don't know where to look. If you have any ideas, I would be most grateful. thanks, Jim

[midwestjim7]

Well, sorry to have taken up your time in reading my previous question (and plea for help!!)

I kept getting the DOS message at boot-up calling for Marvell SATA drivers and RAID drivers. So I changed the hard drive SATA cables from the black headers to the blue headers, used Marvell (whoever they are!) to configure RAID and re-booted with the Vista CD in one of the drives. Did finally get Vista installed (after several BSOD's), but it is up and running.

Time to take a break now and begin to install both drivers and applications. NOT being a commercial box, it is AMAZING how naked the OS is with a total lack of crapware!!!

again, sorry for taking up your time

-jim

[Overclocked]

Hi Jim,

Glad to hear it worked out alright, I was suspecting some hardware problem but wasn't too sure what to suggest.

I agree about the crapware-ridden commercial boxes - have a look at this: PC makers walk fine line with 'crapware' | CNET News.com

Cheers,
Overclocked