Attempting to use a single SATA drive to boot\install XP(Home). I Read the manual and from various net sites took on board more tips than a bookies runner. Disconnected both PATA drives and conected a single Maxtor DiamondMax 10 160Gb SATA2 drive jumpered to SATA1. Enabled SATA Bootrom in BIOS, boot to XP Cdrom. RAID page appears showing single drive but offers only ESC as no array can be set-up (or wanted). XP offers RAID driver etc load on F6 and went through the proceedure to load the SATA drivers extracted from the Asus Cdrom. XP stated no drive recognised. F3 to exit. The only drivers I can find on my Mobo Cdrom are SATA Promise controller drivers. The A8v does not have a Promise controller. Downloaded SATA150 TX drivers which manual indicated should be used. Same proceedure - again only offered the Promise controller. F3 to exit. I can't find on the Asus Cdrom SATA 150 drivers for a single drive. As I said before I don't want a RAID array. I then did a strange thing: Booted to a Window Me floppy and behold FDISK not only recognised the drive but allowed the creation of a Primary Dos Partition. I then formatted it. This is mind numbing, and leaves me with the impression that motherboard technology has fallen behind in this respect. Have been into computers since the days of 8bit ZX80 - but I'm banging my head against a brick wall here. Any practical help (excluding observations about the wall) would be greatly appreciated .... GW

VIA Drivers listed here: http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

It's hard to say if it's a motherboard driver problem or if it's just a problem w/ XP Home. Do you have an XP Pro CD or w2k? XP Home is worthless IMO. I wouldn't expect it to see any drive.

I have installed only one SATA drive, a SATA 2 80gb jumpered as SATA 1, on a fairly recent MSI mboard with an ATI chipset. I had similar problems to what you are having, not with XP Home (SP2 included), but with Win 2000 (no SP's included) - I set it up as a Win2000 / XP Home dual boot on several partitions. I think I can offer some input based on the experiences I had. In any case, your XP Home CD must have at least SP1 included on it in order to recognize a hard drive larger than 128gb (137gb manufacturer's size). If your XP CD doesn't have that, there are workarounds for that situation. The process is a lot more complicated and you will probably need to at least temporaily use an IDE drive in order to do that. It doesn't matter whether you have XP Home or XP Pro or Win 2000 - what matters is whether the CD has at least the minimum service pack included that will support SATA as a bootable drive in SATA mode. Versions previous to that will recognize it only as a SATA non-bootable drive in SATA mode. However, your bios is new enough that it can be set to treat the SATA drive as an EIDE drive (it probably always is new enough when SATA is built into the mboard), then if your service packs if present on the CD are not sufficient, you can update your operating system to support a bootable SATA drive in SATA or RAID mode after you have successfully run Setup. The SATA drive will boot in any case if your bios is set to treat it as an EIDE drive. What version of XP Home do you have? I believe you must have SP2, or possibly at least SP1, to support a bootable SATA drive in SATA mode. (You must have at least SP3 for Win 2000) "I can't find on the Asus Cdrom SATA 150 drivers for a single drive. As I said before I don't want a RAID array." The drivers you need depend on the capabilities of the SATA support - if it is capable of RAID, you load the drivers to support RAID, but you do not have to use the RAID features - the RAID drivers also have drivers that enable using the SATA drive in other SATA modes. Another thing I found in my case is the same drivers were labelled as two different things, depending on whether I loaded them from a floppy included with the mboard, or pointed Windows to the location of drivers on the CD. In your case, the driver you can't seem to find may be the same as the Promise one Windows keeps finding - same drivers, different labelling - if you look inside the *.inf file (in Notepad) for the drivers you downloaded, or the ones on the CD, you may find it has the Promise controller label stated in it. In any case, if you set your bios to treat the SATA drive as an EIDE - if you don't want or need RAID, you don't necessarily have to load the SATA drivers at the beginning of Setup. If your XP Home does not have the necessary service packs (it must have SP1 to support the size of the SATA drive), this may be your only option - you can update your XP installation to newer service packs after Setup has successfully run, and set the bios to treat the SATA as a SATA after that. That is how I got Win 2000 (no service packs) to install - with the bios set to treat the SATA as EIDE, I did not load any SATA drivers at the beginning of Setup, and then 2000 found the SATA drive after the loading of the initial Setup files (when I had tried loading the SATA drivers it was not found) - after Setup successfully completed I updated 2000 to SP4 - then I tweaked lines in Device Manager to remove the EIDE emulation, then I loaded the SATA drivers.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try all the options. Not really happy with this board and trying to convince myself not to dump it. Yes I have a SP1 XP version but tried a later disk which for some reason doesn't indicate what SP version it is - (only have the disk\licence\keycode). I have it loaded onto a spare ATA133 drive & will obtain the version number. Cheers and thenkyou, GW

Thankyou guys for your help. Problem resolved. The Asus A8v and XP (Home) will recognise a Sata drive with files extracted from 8237SATA.RAR to floppy. RAR file was downloaded as an attachment from AsusTek technical assistance. The mobo cdrom simply never included these files required to load Win vers 98 thru XP. GW