ok good call, let us know how it works

getting there thanks for the help i will let you know?

great and good to hear. Long live the patience! :cheesy:

well an update, i removed the slave drive and then copied some fast trak drivers onto a floppy then i put the little jumper back on the hard drive on the setting i thought would be best.
any way did this very late last night and didn't get time to look through it or sort it out properly.
but we have progress!!!!!!!!..........almost
after the small changes i change the bios again to read the sata hard drive and during self test the computer asked for me to press ctrl&f to set up the fast-trak controller so i did and it was there, my new raptor and so i set up a striping array and then continued to load windows xp setup.
when it got to the blue screen at the bottom of the screen it pops up "press F6 to setup a third party scsi or raid etc, so i did and it didn't find anthing so insert the floppy and hit enter and up comes the frasttrak drivers, load them and yea!!!!! :cheesy: windows found the hard drive!!! at last!
anyway left it overnight to format the drive and lo and behold blue screen says cant copy files or something(i don't know i was gonna be late for work so i will try again tonight and let you all know how its going! (what a right kafuffle!) :eek:

Hello peeps
well I haven’t touched my computer for ages as works has taken control of my life for quite a while, anyway the latest is that I finally sat down to tackle the hard drive problem once and for all I tried using win 2000 but it seemed to crash and I’ve been trying partition magic (for about 5mins) and nothing so far so I went back to the old F6 routine with the drivers on the floppy.
now considering that the MB detects the sata drive and so does windows when you in it, it seems when I run xp setup and do the whole F6 thingy I get a choice of drivers they are;
WIN2003PROMISE SATA378 (tm) CONTROLLER
WINXPPROMISE SATA378 (tm) CONTROLLER
WIN2000PROMISE SATA378 (tm) CONTROLLER
WINNTPROMISE SATA378 (tm) CONTROLLER
So I chose the XP version and I get the following message;
"File\winxp\ulsata.sys caused an unexpected error (18) at line 2108 in d: \xpsp1\base\boot\setup\OEMdisk.c." now someone please for the love of all things good and great in the world! Can some tell me what this means and what I need to do to sort it out as I am gong mad thank you! :eek: :eek:

Hooray!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You wouldn't believe it but I’ve done it, but wow what a nightmare
In the end the process I used was this;
went to the western digital site looking for help or advice and found a downloadable program for WD hard drives that will let you create an additional boot drive by copying all files and apps onto that drive, so I got a little 20Gb IDE hard drive and put a fresh copy of win xp on it, (as my other drive had loads of crap on it and it would’ve taken ages) then I loaded the program (called lifeguard) onto it, formatted the SATA drive and copied the files, (which includes win xp onto it, once it was done, I rebooted the pc with just the SATA drive plugged in and changed all the bios changes needed and hey presto!! my pc is now running from my new Raptor drive and wow what a difference in speed, (I mean I thought the difference from my IDE drive would be minor and I probably wouldn’t see a difference but when I started loading programs on like office xp pro it must have loaded it in no more then a minute) mind you I do have a Athlon 64 fx-55 chip and 1Gb of ram, but together they are quick. I was amazed and now it's done I want to thank Nizzy1115 for your help and to say my mood is one of joy and happiness, just need a decent GPU and another 2Gb of ram and I’ll bench mark it, (computers, why do we do it?) :cheesy: :cheesy: :cheesy: :cheesy: