Booting to SATA Drive

[Guest]

I have put together a new system (Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe) that has support for
sata drives along with raid. I’m using the sata feature which has 4 slots
sata 1 thru sata 4.

The bios see’s the drives and windows see’s the drives but it will not boot
to the sata 1 drive. It wants to first have a bootable cd in the drive before
it will check the hdd next. If I set the first boot to the hdd it will hang
there and do nothing…. The bios show’s both the sata drives I have. I didn’t
have a problem seeing the drives when I was installing windows on boot up.

I have loaded all the drivers that came with the board, the only thing I
neglected to do was to use the support for sata in the beginning of the
install of windows, but I didn’t need to it seen the drives during the
install process.


So my question is this: is there a way to get support for the sata to boot
with out reloading the OS again, or could there be something I have missed in
the bios.

 

[Jerry]

Better go back and re-read the instructions in the motherboard manual. I
have an ABIT IC7-MAX 3 with 6 SATA and 2 IDE ( for 4 devices) connectors and
the BIOS must be explicitly set to boot from the SATA. I had to drill down a
couple of screens in the various BIOS pages to get it set correctly.

Also, you should have installed the SATA drivers during the XP install
process. If you can now, somehow get to the desktop you can try installing
them from there.

 

[Bob Harris]

I have an ASUS P4S8X, about 2 years old now. It has two SATA drives and no
IDE drives. The first thing I had to do to boot from SATA was to set the
boot order as follows:

1. ATAPI CD-ROM [IDE DVD-ROM 16x]
2. Removeable Device [Legacy Floppy]
3. IDE Hard Drive [None]
4. Other Bootable device [SCSI/Onboard ATA Boo] <<<this is poorly
worded in the manual, but means SATA boot

In my case I also had to enter the FastTrack Controller and build two RAID
arrays, one for each disk. This took a few tries, and I had to read the
manual twice. The defaults were to mirror or stripe, and I wanted
independent disks.

It sounds like you might not need to build a RAID array, or perhaps you have
already done that.

However, you certainly must set the boot order to include an SATA device.

After that, you probably need to hit F6 early in the XP installation to load
third-party drivers for SATA. Note that the drivers are for the controller,
not the hard drves, so they come from the motherboard maker, not the disk
maker. They must be on a floppy, not on a CD; that is a limiation of the XP
installer.

 

[Len Mattix]

I have this MB and use a SATA boot drive for my OS. The only issue I found
is that there are two controllers for SATA so making sure the drive is on
the proper controller is job one. The second issue is that the Nvidia
controllers have two types of connectors. One set is for raided drives only
where the others support single drives. Initially I installed my SATA data
cable on the wrong controller and nothing good came of it. Switching the
the other controller allowed booting from my SATA drive. Unfortunately I
had to reinstall XP as the drive had been used on another MB but it was
definitly seen as the boot device on the correct channel.

HTH,
Len

 

[mcl]

When I upgraded a few months ago with a new mb I didn't reinstall Xp.I had
brought over the HD I had used with the old system (120gb EIDE). I told it
to install windows, but then told it to repair the install rather than
completely install. Worked great. Set it back of course to a fresh install.
When SP2 came out I opted to get a CD from MS rather than download
eventhough I have a broadband connection. So I then through in the SP2 CD.
Everything went great and quick. Finally through in the CD for the mb and
installed the utilities and sound drivers. It couldn't have gone much
smoother.

"Unfortunately I