K8V SE Deluxe > SATA > a beginner's problems and solutions..

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (More info?)

Deciding to up-size of my hard drives and as the board has sata
capability, I purchased two sata drives and as I was also going to get a dvd
burner, I thought, what the h, it too, might as well be sata.

With the ide system still in place, all drives were tested on the Via
controller (without having to add drivers). As the Asus manual states that the
Promise controller doesn't support cdrom devices, the hard drives would go on
the Promise and the dvd on the Via.

With the Promise controller set to 'enabled-ide mode', XP would start
the install (from the ide cdrom), accept the drivers (after f6), continue, then
stop, saying no hard drive was found. After several attempts I updated the bios,
thinking that this might solve the problem, but this time, the notice of No
Ntldr was displayed?? Next, I made my 'normal' adjustments to the bios (no on
board sound, no parallel port, no serial port-2, no 1394, boot from cdrom), This
time XP installed without any problems!! With a sata drive on the Promise
controller, the Boot from Floppy (default) is not ignored, as it would be on an
ide setup, if there is no disk in the floppy drive?? Boot from cdrom must be the
first choice.

After the install of XP, when re-checking the bios settings, I noticed
that I had NOT disabled the 1394 port. I disabled it and re-booted to the now
familiar notice 'No hard drives found!'. Re-enabled 1394 and all was well
again??

As a beginner at this, I would have thought that Asus would have made
some reference in the manual to a relationship between sata controllers and the
1394 ports (whatever that might be). It seemed logical (to me) to turn off
devices that aren't being used. A comment about the boot sequence would have
been appreciated, as well.

Basically, the installation of the operating system on the sata drive
was only due to perseverance and luck. The system works well, but here are a few
other observations:

a. XP w/SP-2 won't make a start-up floppy disk that will allow you to
access drives running on the Promise controller, or the sata dvd on the Via
controller.

b. The system won't boot from the sata dvd.

c. Ide hard drives are not seen when attached to the primary, or secondary ide
connections, but the ide cdrom works.