Hi, im a complete novice to building computers and i bought a new sata harddrive(160Gb Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 10) and new mobo(Gigabyte GA K8NSC-939). When i turned it on it said insert boot disc so i inserted the disc i got with mobo which i was told you do before you install windows but when i did try to run the mobo disc i got "ERROR your harddrive doesn't support HPA!" so i couldn't go any farther. Anybody know what this means and if there's anyway around it or will have have to go back to my IDE HD?

Somebody has confused you a little (or didn’t know what they were talking about).

HPA means Host Protected Area, and is usually used to create hidden restore or diagnostic partitions. Gigabyte resource discs usually include a bootable image and various utilities. I wasn’t previously aware, but it seems that they also include support for the creation of an HPA partition. This is not necessary for you to install Windows.

For some situations you need to use an additional driver [floppy] disk during the first phase of Windows XP/2000 installation. These are created from source material on the resource disc you get with the motherboard. These situations include using ACHI or RAID.

Your motherboard has an nForce 3 chipset, and with that, a compatibility mode SATA controller which can use the standard IDE controller driver included with Windows. For this reason, you do not need to use a driver disk during installation, but rather, install the nForce chipset drivers after installation.


In any event, don’t worry about it. Just go ahead and use the HDD normally.

PHEW so i just install windows first then, thank you syphus.

No problem, and good luck