My computer died a couple of weeks ago , so I decided to rebuild it. Here’s what I used :

Asus M2A-VM motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ cpu
2 gig A-Data DDR memory

Here’s what I had from my old machine
Maxtor 40 gig IDE hard drive
WD 160 gig IDE hard drive
Pioneer DVD IDE burner

Since the new motherboard only has one IDE slot I purchased an LG sata DVD burner

The 40 gig hard drive was going to be used for my OS so I decided to reinstall WIN XP pro. When installing windows the LG drive kept stopping and shutting down eventually I had to plug in my old Pioneer IDE to install the OS. I installed windows and everything worked fine but I still wanted to installed the sata dvd. When I installed it the BIOS and windows recognized it but I kept getting errors burning and reading disks. I took it back to the store and they thought it was bad so I decied to exchange it for a new Sata hard drive . I bought a Seagate Barracuda 250 gig sata to install my OS to. This is where the problems started My Bios found the HD but windows setup would not . I used the F6 at startup to install the sata drivers from Asus. I’ve read that I shouldn’t need to do this with WinXP service pack2 . Anyway everything installed fine but then a day later the computer crashed and the hard drive could not be detected. So I tried to install windows again – this this I didn’t need to hit F6 at startup. Everything seem to work again but the computer crashed and again it won’t boot up. I tried one more time – this time I installed windows but nothing else ie video drivers , sound etc. Now the system will crash but I can reboot the computer to windows. How should the drive be setup in the BIOS – right now I have it as an IDE drive but my other options are AHCI and RAID. If I change it to AHCI computer hangs and if I choose RAID computer can’t find bootable disk – Now I’m stuck – Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks for your help

You need two drives for raid, Keep it as IDE.

It sounds to me like you've got a defective SATA controller on your motherboard. See if you can find somebody who will let you borrow a PCI SATA controller and see if that fixes the problem.

Thanks for the reply - I think I have it figured out. In my BIOS I have the option to enable AHCI. When I do WinXP wouldn't load. So I reformated the drive and reinstalled WinXP while having AHCI enabled. I had to hit F6 when installing and insert a floppy with the drivers on it from Asus. Everything seems good now . Almost a week and no craches.

Yeah easiest way is to use nlite to integrate your chipset drivers into a new windows xp cd