I'm getting frustrated trying to get the onboard SATA channels of an AMD880 motherboard to be recognized during Windows 7 installation. I tried and failed to resolve this with some files on a USB drive. I then check Asus' support page for the motherboard. They helpfully list the drivers, but neglect to offer a download link for them.
I decide I'll just find the original CD that came with the motherboard.
So I go to grab my Ancient Box of Disks, conveniently located on an upper shelf of the Big Messy Closet.
Disaster. The entire box tumbles over and every disk in the box is scattered through that corner of the Messy Closet.
Spend the next hour rummaging around, trying to gather all the floppies and CDs in the vain hope that I won't lose any.
In the bottom corner of the closet, I find a box. It's in my way. The box is innocently labeled as containing some "old drives". This is from the quaint old days when all my "old drives" could fit in one little box.
Inside... huh? I lost this stuff ages ago. My 3 oldest hard drives... a 40MB Type 17 Conner (OEM from our 386SX), a 240MB Conner, and a 1.6GB WD (which had bad sectors in it's first year - piece of crap). And some other junk I've already forgotten about. It has been so many years since I misplaced those hard drives that I wondered if I had thrown them out. Nope.. they've just been hiding.
The Conners were both perfectly good last I used them. They were in tattered old ESD bags. I carefully moved them to new 3M resealable ESD shielding bags and stored them with the rest of my hard drives - finally where they belong. And back to cleaning up all the disks.
By the way, the driver CD I was looking for was not in the box I had reached for. An hour after cleaning all this mess, I found it somewhere else. And it doesn't work. Windows 7 still refuses to see the SSD plugged into the SATA ports.
Not sure whether to be happy or pissed. I can't get Windows 7 to install, but hey, I found some ancient hard drives in my closet.
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Edit: Problem solved. Windows 7, just like older versions, is confused when it doesn't understand what's already on the target drive, and believes the best way to respond is to act as if the drive doesn't exist. After "cleaning" the drive, now it's recognized.
This is rather maddening behavior when I have never suggested that it needed to concern itself with anything that was stored there. Just do a clean install please, Windows, and don't act stupid.
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Edit: Another problem solved. Turns out Modern-Windows will also refuse to install if the target drive isn't configured as the first drive in the boot order in your BIOS. https://tomrichards.net/2014/01/how-not-to-in … erating-system/
Windows is doing overtime finding cryptic excuses not to install itself.