"alexander" said:
how do i install xp on a sata drive (P5S800-VM)
A good question. Your manual has no info on the Southbridge
and its RAID/IDE features.
The manual that most closely resembles the storage on your
board, would be the manual for the P4S800D. Page 77 has some
info on storage and describes the features of the 964 Southbridge
on your motherboard.
http://www.asuscom.de/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4S800D/e1443_p4s800d.zip
I have seen some comments in Google, about avoiding the
SISIDE driver. The reason being, it cannot be uninstalled,
as the uninstall is broken. If you do try the SISIDE driver,
you can edit the setup.ini file, and change "Performance=1"
to "Performance=0". Then, reinstall the same driver. This
operation will turn off data caching in driver RAM, and possibly
improve the robustness of the file system if a crash happens.
There are also some comments in this Abxzone thread. Start
at the bottom of the page and work upwards. The P4S800D-E
has two storage devices, and you are interested specifically
in comments about the 964 Southbridge interface, and not
the separate SIS180 chip that the D-E board uses.
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-68049.html
So, in order of driver preference, try using no driver during
install (and hope the default MS IDE driver is installed
and works - I don't know if SP1 is needed for this to work
or not). Next, I would try installing the SIS RAID driver
using F6 and a driver floppy (even though a single drive is
not RAID, maybe the drive will still be picked up). If that
doesn't work, then I would resort to an F6 install of the
SISIDE driver (having editted the setup.ini, to turn off
caching).
You'll know within three installs, which option works
Paul