Jonathan123

I've been fighting for 4 days with a Gigabyte mobo GA-8I915DUOPRO, which is PCI-Express and a Western Digital SATA Caviar 200GB S150 8MB 7200rpm. I have a DVD-RW on the box as well. The task was a new PC build for XP home. The swine refused to boot, refused to find the DVD, or the disk or both. I swapped out the PSU, changed mobo's (I had 2 the same), switched memory, reseated another CPU/FAN, switched cables etc. Then yesterday I searched and found this thread which got me thinking, and last night I cracked it. Hurrah! The solution is in the BIOS: Advanced BIOS Features: 1. Hard Disk Boot Priority: said card first (even though had none) to get it to boot from the cd. May not be needed as I tried enhanced SATA mode after this (see later) 2. First Boot devide: CD Integrated Peripherals: 1. SATA RAID/AHCI Mode: DISABLED 2. On-Chip SATA MODE: enhanced 3. Onboard H/W RAID: Diabled i.e. I disabled all raid stuff, set it to boot from CD, and changed the SATA mode to enhanced. THIS WORKED! Try using enhanced sata mode only before doing the rest, this was the last thing I did, and because it started working I left the rest alone. So thanks for the hints, and I hope this helps some other poor soul. Jonathan bold text