GA-H67N-USB3-B3 & Storage drivers

[Begall]

Ok, so I have the above motherboard in a system which also has a Corsair M4 64GB SSD and a 2TB WD HDD. I'm attempting to install Windows 7 from a USB stick (HTPC, no disc drive). The problem that is driving me crazy is that I cannot get Windows to see my drivers. Additionally, booting in the default IDE mode with the M4 plugged in causes it to go crazy at post and corrupt the screen.

Things I have tried:

Running in both ACHI mode & RAID mode and pointing windows to the correct drivers on a USB stick. It finds them, picks the compatible one (Express Chipset Server/Workstation/Desktop) and then scans for drives again. It fails to find either.

Running in IDE mode with just the WD HDD. Still no joy.

Running in IDE mode with 'Manual' and 'Large' Selected in the IDE channels, which allows it to boot with the M4 installed. Nope, you guessed it, nothing!

Adding to the aggravation is the fact that Windows can SEE the 2TB drive (which is already formatted & has files on it) when it wants me to tell it where the drivers are. This happens even in ACHI mode when supposedly no drivers are installed. I'm totally confused, any ideas?

[Gloup_Gloup]

Hi Degall,  

Welcome to forum, 

Help are here .... About parameters on BIOS or on Windows with IDE or AHCI...
How can I switch to AHCI Mode after installing Windows in IDE Mode?
http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,6721.0.html

Gloup_Gloup

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

The only thing that springs to mind staright away is what have you got the boot menu set to ?

Also what ports do you have the drives attached to ?

[Begall]

The boot menu is set with the Bootable USB stick first, followed by the hard discs. When this has accidently changed and a hard disc goes first it attempts to boot from it and as expected it fails to find the bootloader. I've tried all 4 SATA ports in the various configurations and they all have the same result.

My current line of thinking is that the above suggests the hardware is sound - the only point of failure is the Windows Installer. I'm guessing that for whatever reason it's corrupted in some subtle fashion. I'm going to try and install Mythbuntu when I get home this evening, and if it works I'll know it's a software problem. And then I'll probably stick with it because it will do everything I need it to do, even if I have to learn some new stuff!

[Gloup_Gloup]

Hi Begall, 

Have you chec in BIOS your setting for :
First-Second-Third Boot Device.
Hard Disk Boot Priority

Gloup_Gloup