Maxtor DiamondMax 21 HDD problems

[emark]

Mobo Abit KV7-V, socket A, Barton 3000+.

Attempting clean install of windows XP (slipstreamed with SP 2). Very strange problem. The drive should be jumped to 150Gb/s (max of board) but when it is I can't boot from CD.

Why should this be?????

[Chewy]

will your cd boot the computer with the drive disconnected?

[emark]

its a complete pain - with the drive (320gb diamondmax 21) jumped to 150Gb/s, it is recognised by the VIA SATA RAID utility. I've got the boot order HDD then CD Rom. The line boot from CD rom appears, then a return but no more.
I can get the CD to boot with the drive unattached and if a quickly attach the drive window will start to install. I can then load VIA drivers (from abit) and the install will recognise the drive. I can then create a windows partition, format it, install the startup files and the computer will restart. It hangs at the verifying DMI pool data..... line.
Without the jumper, ie at 300 GB/s the disk isn't recognised.
I've also tried disabling the onboard SATA support in the bios but that doesn't work.
I'm at a bit of a loss. The VIA SATA RAID utility is the latest version 4.3 and was installed previously - I'm swapping a now defunct drive. I can only think there is a fundamental hardware conflict or that somehow the RAID utility is causing a problem. I would imagine that a totally clean install with a new mobo, this would not be present.

[Chewy]

set to boot to cd then hard drive

make sure raid is not enabled(no array)

boot to cd, press F6

give windows just the serial drivers on floppy

let windows see the hard drive and partition and format it