Booting from a SATA drive with an ABIT AN7 motherboard.

I have just bought and assembled a new PC with the ABIT AN7
motherboard and a single SATA HDD, however, when I tried to install
the OS (XP-Pro) it told me that it couldn't install because it
couldn't find any HDD's. I have never used a SATA drive before, and
my first thought was that they can't be bootable - but I don't believe
this.....

There is a floppy that came with the motherboard labelled SATA Driver
Disk, but I cannot see any way to load the drivers without the
OS??????

Can anyone please offer any help.

Barrie

Hi,



Not sure, but thinkg that windows XP does not standardly support SATA,
at least not all controllers.
If it is an onboard controller thatn you should definitely be able to
boot from the harddrive connected to this controller.
Now to install the OS, you want to boot from CD, and while your setup is
booting, at the bottom at some point you will get a message to press
F6 if you want to load hard disk controller drivers, so press the F6
then and then you will need your floppy with the driver, at that pint
you should be able to load the driver see, the disk and install the OS
on it, job done.
Just swap your boot order from CD to this harddrive and you are up and
running.

Barrie Evans wrote:

> I have just bought and assembled a new PC with the ABIT AN7
> motherboard and a single SATA HDD, however, when I tried to install
> the OS (XP-Pro) it told me that it couldn't install because it
> couldn't find any HDD's. I have never used a SATA drive before, and
> my first thought was that they can't be bootable - but I don't believe
> this.....
>
> There is a floppy that came with the motherboard labelled SATA Driver
> Disk, but I cannot see any way to load the drivers without the
> OS??????
>
> Can anyone please offer any help.
>
> Barrie

Hey, i know its been allmost a month since anyone has answered back to
you and you have prob. already found the fix, but i though id give you
an answer anyway. All you have to do is boot your winxp cd up, and
just when you get into the blue setup screen (just after the computer
has booted) press "F6". you will see this prompted at the bottom of
the screen where it says what the setup is loading.

It will actually pause on "Press F6 now to load Raid Devices" (or
something like that) for about 5 seconds so you have the chance to
press F6.

After you have done all that, it will keep loading for a bit then come
to a screen that will be asking you to put in the disk that you were
talking about.

after that it should be smooth installing. I know you prob. already
have fixed it but i just though id answer anyway.

Id be interested to see what you thought of the AN7. im looking at
getting one in the next couple of days.

I hope i helped.

The information that you have been given is correct but is not all you
need. I have installed SATA Maxtor9 160GB on Asus a7nx8 delux had the
same problem. In order to effect a quick installation head for the
BIOS make hard disk SCSI(XP does not recognise SATA) you will then as
the previous instructions told you f6 at start up make sure that the
driver is on a floppy on its own my driver was not recognised on
original disk as one of three
Hope this helps