xp installaition problem

this can be a simple problem or a very complicated one. ill start with the simple fix. your drives may not be communicating properly with the motherboard. which means that you will have to go to each of your drives and make sure that they are set properly to either master (which is the drive you want to have with your operating system) or slave, also if your drives have an auto select feature on it make one master and the rest auto select. if that is not your problem you could have a bad connection from your hard drives to the mother board, make sure all the connections are secure. if either of these is not the problem you could also have bad drives or the drives need to be formated to be fat 32. the formating can be done in the windows install section, that is if you can see the drives when preforming a windows install. obviously if the drives are bad that means you need new ones. but make that a last resort if nothing else works.

I am wondering, how did you connect your 5 drives when a common IDE cable can only connect 2 and with the primary and secondary IDE slot of your motherboard you can only have 4 connections. Where did you connect your optical drive? Are you using SATA? At boot up after the memory test your BIOS will list all dives detected. if its not there then check your BIOS if drives are set to auto detect or you could set it yourself there. If your BIOS cannot see it windows will not see it too, Vinceclipse did a detailed instruction on how to check your HDD connection. Good luck abhishek.