EggXpert

Before I get into the details of my problem, I want to give some background on something that may be relateed as I am not 100% sure the problem is due to my new mobo or if it is hard drive related.

I recently had had to RMA my 680i A1 to EVGA due to network and some graphical issues.  That new mobo arrived DOA.  Now on my new mobo I purchased to replace the DOA one (I bought this one to get away from EVGA's defective products, I had 3 parts go bad in 3 months from them), the hard drives will get detected in the BIOS when I look there but when I try to boot, I get No hard drives detected as a message.  I have tried changing settings in the BIOS for the Storage Configuration.  I have options of IDE, RAID, or AHCI.  None of those options fix the problem.  I get the same error message no matter what when I boot.

When I try to install Vista, I get 2 disks that appear.  Disk 0 which has a capacity of 7 MB and Disk 1 which has a capacity of 298.1 GB.  Both of my hard drives are 320 GB drives which after formatting results in the 298.1 GB size.  My second hard drive partitioned in two with a 200 GB and a 98.1 GB setup.  Neither of those partitions are showing up when I try to install Vista and when I try to install to the 298.1 GB drive that is showing up, I get a message that this drive cannot be used.

Any suggestions to try would be appreciated.  I am considering flashing the BIOS tonight to see if it helps but I am not 100% sure that will resolve the issues as both SATA drives show up in the BIOS setup screens. 

My current system specs are what is in my sig with these exceptions.  I only have 2 GB of the RAM installed right now.  The motherboard is the one I am having issues with.  The CPU is a Q9300, and I replaced the Samsung IDE DVD burner with a Samsung SATA DVD burner.

Update after further testing suggested by co-workers:

 My co-workers thought the issue might be that the mobo was new enough that it needed other SATA drivers which when I tried did not resolve the issue.  However, when I hook up a different SATA hard drive with XP on it that I borrowed from a co-worker for testing, the borrowed hard drive boots fine.  That leads me to believe the problem is with the hard drives instead of the motherboard.  As such, I am going to do some other testing after work and test the hard drives in my spare machine which I have been using while my primary PC was down.