ahoy,
Having a fair bit of trouble boting from sata, cant work it out! Got a new system set up with a 200gig Sata2 on an asus ummm A8V? (pretty sure thats the model) and the damn thing just wont boot! Made the boot floppy and all, and it doesnt pick it up in bios prior to booting to the cd/floppy... but the drive will spin up in that once you feed xp the extra driver, but to no avail...

Any help would be well appriciated, cheers....

I have an asus p4c800 motherboard, I just enabled SATA in the bios, made the SATA drive primary boot device and installed windows as if it was on an IDE drive. I didn't need any extra drivers I don't think. Are you using the SATA port in IDE or RAID mode?

Don't you need to press F6 when the windows install starts up to tell it to load the driver from the disk.

is it a Western Digital SATA2 drive? they don't work nicely with the A8V.

you'll need XP SP1a or greater to recognise the drive correctly on install

Its a seagate drive, doesnt find it even if you go the F6 in xp (with SP2 as well) and feed it the drivers, also it is enabled in bios. I am now thinking there may be something wrong with the hard drive cause the mobo says hardware failure... but its brand spankin new... and "people" rekon some asus boards are dodgy on SATA booting?

If you can't see it in BIOS you are in trouble. If its not showing in BIOS its not going to show anywhere (unless you are using them on a RAID controller, then they would detect and show up in the init screen after POST)

Im pretty sure I have had problems with these boards with sata2 drives... I'm pretty sure it was the A8V's, try jumpering the HDD to run at SATA1 standard. If this is the board I am remembering I couldnt get any WD drives to go without being jumpered to SATA1 nor any Seagate newer than the .7 drives, rev .8 or .9 would just not detect.

I beleive that was the only way I could get them to function, so try this first.

As per usual make sure -

* SATA (or RAID if you are using it) controller is ENABLED in BIOS, otherwise you aint gonna see s***.
* Cables are plugged in correctly, try another power and data cable to eliminate those from the equation.
* Motherboard flashed to latest BIOS available (even try any beta BIOSes)

last edited by rubba-chikin at 16:42:29 29/Apr/06

cheers for the help, did all that, tried different cables etc. Its not raid btw. Anyway, it needed to be fixed asap for some business work so we are using a temporary drive (Note: the following may disturb some readers: we are using a ...... IMB deskstar 30gig). pretty sure its the hard drive thats being gay anyway so I will go test it when I can and then send it back....if it be the problem! Cheers anyways.......

Have you tried jumpering the drive to work at SATA1 standard?

Check for a newer bios version on asus website