Upgraded Motherboard, Processor, and RAM, Windows won't boot

I just upgraded my comp, and I'm having some challenges.

Old system:

GIGABYTE GA-K8NF-9 939 NVIDIA nForce4 4X ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 2.0GHz Socket 939 Single-Core Processor Model ADA3200BPBOX
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model VS1GBKIT400
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE/ATAPI Model ND-3550A
LITE-ON 52X CD Burner Black IDE Model SOHR-5239V
I don't have the stats on my video card, because I upgraded that when the one I bought went down. I'm pretty sure it's an Nvidia 7800GT.

New parts:

GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model ADQVE1B16K
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Brisbane 2.7GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor Model ADO5200DOBOX

Everything went well with the actual changing of the parts, and when I turned it on, I checked the BIOS and all of the components were registering. However, it would not continue to boot. I recalled that I had had the HD set up on a RAID configuration previously, so I went in and added the drive to the array. Started it up again, and I got to where I needed to put the XP disk in to repair the installation. It started to load the initial XP stuff, and when I pressed "R" to repair, I was told that I had no hard drive. I recalled that when I built the system two years ago, the SATA connection had given me quite a few problems getting right, so I did some research and found that the motherboard had the SATA drivers on it. I went in to setup XP again, and pressed F6 to install the drivers. I inserted the motherboard disk when it asked me to, but it did not recognize it. I tried the other optical drive as well, it still didn't recognize it. I gave up and re-inserted the XP drisk and cancelled out. It again said that it couldn't find my hard drive. I went to re-boot, and when it got to the part were it should have run the XP disk again, all of the data on the screen started disappearing, as if someone had pressed the backspace key. Now the computer won't even post. Can someone help me to fix this?

 

Sorry.
After re-reading your post I realized the advice I gave, you had already tried and it didn't work.

 

This is now getting extremely frustrating. I downloaded the SATA driver directly from Gigabyte, but again, when I tried to add it during Windows set-up, it didn't recognize the driver. It just doesn't make sense that the motherboard is recognizing the hard drive, but Windows isn't. Any other ideas out there?

 

If I may throw my two cents in here. Let me get this straight, you have only one hard drive and had it setup on raid? It takes a minimum of two drives to make a array. Go back into the bios and check your sata settings. There are usually a few different settings. You can try each setting and see if windows setup will pick up the drive with out preloading the sata drivers.

 

Yes, that is correct, I set it up that way when I first built the computer two years ago. In the RAID portion, you can set it up for just one drive, using the stripe setting. I did take it off of the RAID setting, just to see what happened, and Windows is still not recognizing the hard drive. It feels as if I am very close, but I don't know what I am missing.

I did some research on this, and found something on Microsoft's site that is supposed to work when you change motherboards.

It said to leave the old motherboard in, and start a Windows Update, then when the computer restarts, sut down the computer and change out the motherboards. Supposedly, when you start it back up, it will finish the update and load everything you need loaded.

Has anyone ever done this? Would it work?

 

Ok, I've given up on the new motherboard, et.al., and went to put my harddrive back into the previous rig, and now *IT* won't run windows either... I tried to run the windows disk to do a repair, and again, no recognition of the harddrive. I've tried to get the SATA drivers from the mobo disk, but there are 5 different drivers on there. How do you tell which one to use? I tried two different ones, and no dice. I am frankly getting tired of having to guess what to do to get the bloody thing to work.

 

Well, I hate to be the one that mentions this but all that swapping back and forth between two different raid controllers may have corrupted your drive. You might want to try booting from a live linux cd and see if you can even access the drive at all. You may wind up having to flush the drive and start fresh.........