Re: Making a SATA drive the boot drive

From: Bob Harris (rharris270[SPAM)
Date: 12/17/04 

Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 20:03:25 -0500

SATA is newer than XP, so it can not automatically detect these disks.

Instead, you need to press F6 early in the XP installation (watch the bottom
of the screen). Then, you need to have the SATA drivers on a floppy. They
must be on a floppy, not on a CD. The XP installer will take what it needs.
OR, it will present you with a choice, if there are multiple drivers (e.g.,
98, 2000, XP); choose XP.

But, before you even think about installing XP, you need to determine
whether the SATA controller is also a RAID contoller. My ASUS P4S8X has a
combined RAID/SATA controller. So, I first needed to make a "RAID array".
But, I did not want to link two disks, so I used the custom RAID options to
make an array of one disk. The ASUS manual helped, but only a little about
this important step.

An interseting aside: Until I made an array, even the Seagate disk prep
tools could not see the disk. However, in your case it sounds like your
motherboard is handling some of this for you, since you mention that XP can
see the disk, after XP is installed on an IDE disk. Or, it could be that it
knows that one one SATA disk must be in an array of its own, or maybe you do
not have a RAID contoller.

One other item I recall about the installation process: I needed to go into
the BIOS and set te boot options to include:

IDE hard drive = none
other boot device = SCSI/onboard ATA boot

and this option on the advanced tab:

onboard ATA device = enable
onboard ATA device first = yes

As for master and slave, the concepts do not apply to SATA disks, since they
are one disk per controller.

"BobV" <robowa@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:uTuvqBz4EHA.2600@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
>I have a new ASUS A7N8X-E with a SATA controller on board, and a new WD
>SATA drive, and am finding it impossible to make it the boot disk.
>
> XP SP2 will recognize the disk as long as I have a IDE disk installed, and
> the SATA disk is usable, but I am unable to use it as the boot drive. If
> I try to reinstall XP without the IDE drive then the install won't run
> because it says that there are no drives at all.
>
> I can use XP's disk management to partition and format the SATA drive but
> this doesn't help.
>
> Any answers, thanks, Bob
>

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