So i have a computer with two ATA hard drives installed on it right now and i just bought a 300 GB Maxtor SATA hard drive. I wanted to install Windows XP on the new drive because i wanted to make that my bootable hard drive with all my programs and what not on it. I tried to install windows and it says that it cannot locate any hard drive installed (even though i had it as drive G when i booted off of my other hard drive). Anyways, so i talked with the guy i bought it drom and he gave me some files to put on a disk that had drivers that were for my motherboard to enable SATA (keep in mind it already worked on the other drives OS, which was XP also). The motherboard is a P4S800D-X made by ASUS. So i hit F6 when it told me to and i hit "S" when it came to the screen for install the SCSI drivers, but when i click on ech of the WinXP drivers it just brings up a screen saying that it cannot go past line and then it says d:/something/something/something (the somethings are replaced with the actual file name), it had to deal with boot or something like that. Anyways i cannot get past this part in installing my hard drive, i know it works perfectly and i can put stuff in it when accessing it from the other hard drive but when i try doing a new fresh copy of XP on the 300gb drive.... NADA.

So please help me if you can, THANK YOU
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Sounds like you got the wrong drivers. Go to asus.com. I can't link directly to the driver page, it's a stupid design, but on that page, select 'drivers' from 'select category', and enter: P4S800D-X as 'Input Model to Searc'.

Read this thread for more information about maximum hard drive sizes for Windows and hardware.

If you have the install cd for your asus motherboard still, you can use that, create the windows xp sata raid driver disk, it's probably better to get the one from asus directly though. Also, and this is a very easy mistake to make, use a fresh, new floppy disk. Floppy disks fail very easily, so it's always wise to assume that the floppy itself is corrupted. I also run into problems sometimes with my floppy drive being too dirty to read floppies, since I never use it. Take off the cover and blow into it really hard to get the dirt out, or use those compressed air things.

The directions are not very good for that installation I have to say on their manual.

Once you have the right driver floppy created, start again, and do the steps that didn't work last time.

There should be some readme files on the floppy driver disk, there usually are, they can help sometimes in figuring out why it's not working.

If you have Windows XP pre service pack 1, you might run into some problems getting windows xp to recognize the whole 300 gigabyte disk, the best solution to that is to create a smaller partition on the disk for the os, which you should do anyway, say 10 or 15 gigabytes, then once you successfully install xp, and upgrade it to service pack 2, you should get access to the rest of the disk, if all goes well.

Also make sure that the sata 300 gigabyte drive is correctly set in th bios, and that the bios is correctly identifying the 300 gig sata drive, and that you have it correctly configured, not raid, but standard. Sometimes you have to go into the actual sata bios, which is sometimes separate from the main bios, depends on the mobo, and configure it in a not very intuitive way, in with gigabyte mobos you have to first set in the main bios 'sata raid active', then in the sata bios, you have to set it to non-raid. Asus may be different, I don't know. Once you're sure that the bios is actually correctly configured, you can go ahead with installing xp again. But the 300 gig drive may be causing you problems.

However, if you can read and write to it from the other os, that's probably not the problem.
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