First, my PC specs:

BACKGROUND (Not necessary to read): About a year ago i bought 2 new 1tb HDD's. To my dismay, I realised I only had 2 SATA connections on my motherboard. Thus, I planned on emptying my old 250gig HDD's onto the new disks and installing a new operating system on one of them. Only, I made the mistake of trying to use the 'upgrade' function from within windows. The result was that my old XP installation disappeared irrevocably (that was a shock) and that even though I installed Vista on one of the new drives, it put the boot record on my old 250gb c:\ drive. Thus disabling the use of anything except that setup. After poking and prodding for a week or so, I finally gave up and started using this as a temporary setup.

PROBLEM 1: When the Windows 7 Beta arrived a while ago, I thought that would be a good time to get a new operating system. I tried to install it, but the installer simply would not recognise my new Samsung spinpoint drives. It only recognised the smaller ones, and I installed the Beta on one of those. I attributed this to it being a Beta version, and tried again with the RC, but no luck.

Now though, I have downloaded Windows 7 from MSDN, and it still does not want to recognise any of my 2 1tb HDD's. A friend of mine bought the exact same HDD's from the same place, and he hasn't had this problem at all. I REALLY want to install Windows 7 and get a workable windows. Does anyone have any idea of what could be wrong?

PROBLEM 2: Windows 7 (beta) does not want to recognise my new monitor as being able to handle 1920*1080. Vista didn't either, but I could force Vista to output the correct resolution. With Windows 7, any attempt I make to force the resolution only results in me getting 1600*1200 (which looks silly on a 16:9 screen). My monitor only runs on VGA, so I'm using a DVI>VGA adapter to get the signal from my graphics card to my screen. This appears to be a known problem for Windows 7, but none of the workarounds I have tried has worked. Any ideas?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529/

That has some interesting info.

I don't think it has anything to do with the boot record. Windows installation disks already come with the FDisk utilities needed to fix any boot sector problems you may have. I think your problems may be elsewhere. Try turning off any 'RAID' or 'AHCI' functions in BIOS.

Hmm.. interesting text, even though it has nothing to do with my current problems :(

I'll take a look in my bios... it might have something to do with it. Just flashed my bios with the newest version, but that didn't help.

No what I mean is theres a setting for the HDD in bios. If its set to AHCI Windows 7 may not detect it.

I also have 2 Samsung SpinPoint (1TB & 1.5TB) drives and I haven't any problems in connection with Windows 7.

As for the monitor. I had the same problem. Just press "Detect" in the "Screen Resolution" window and it should show the correct resolutions.

Yeah, I got that. I couldn't find any setting for it to put it to AHCI though. I don't even know what that means. I'll look it up, and see if I missed something.

Yeah, I really don't think there's a problem with the type of drives themselves. I believe it is a hardware problem most likely related to my motherboard.

As for the bolded part: You really thought that would work, didn't you :D It was the second thing I tried...

I even went as far as to make a custom driver with a program someone on a forum pointed to. Even that didn't work :(

I always forget about that after an OS installation and I klick on anything until it works. So yeah it took me a bit longer to figure out, but it worked

EDIT: While you're at it, write a 64-bit driver for my printer please, so I can finally delete my 2nd OS...

Hmm you could try downloading the SATA drivers or installing them off your motherboard driver disc during installation? Does it come up with an option to 'install drivers' when you get to the point where you select which HDD to use?

Try fiddling with the HDD modes in BIOS, btw which motherboard brand/model do you have?