I'll soon be installing a Seagate SATA drive on an Asus A7N8X-E deluxe mobo. In order to boot from the SATA drive, I know I must press F6 to install third party drivers for the Silicon Image RAID/SATA controller before my Windows XP install. My questions are, since I won't be using RAID, which driver from the Silicon Image website should I use, the SATA Windows IDE driver, or the SATA Windows Raid driver? I'm pretty sure i'd have to install the Raid driver, but I just wanted to confirm. Also, I am not planning on installing a floppy drive, but I hear Windows requires the drivers to be installed from A: after pressing F6. Does the Windows provide the opportunity to load the drivers from elsewhere (like a USB device, ie. a USB key, or a CD)? If not, could I load the drivers from an external USB floppy Drive? Thanks.

If you could borrow a floppy drive and ribbon cable from someone, that'll save you the hassle of USB drives etc. No need to fit it into the case, just open the case and plug it in to the motherboard FDD port and PSU for this task. Or just buy one, they're only about £4. You don't need to install the RAID drivers (Press CTRL+S or F4) usually. The RAID driver setup should see your HDD on the way in though. Your board has an on-board Silicon Image 3112A PCI SATA adapter, which is the same as my motherboards. My motherboard came with a floppy with the SATA drivers on it, there is also a copy of it on the drivers CD. After pressing F6, Windows setup will load a few drivers and then say it can't find a HDD, press 'S' to select a driver... When windows asks which driver, it'll be called something like "Silicon Image 3211a SATA RAID driver for WinXP" Then you're home free AMD Athlon XP2200+ Aero7 lite 512mb Crucial pc2700 Abit NF7-s V2.0 80GB Seagate SATA 120GB Seagate SATA Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb Benq FP767-12 17" 12ms SB live 5.1 Digital

Be sure to go into bios and enable the sata controller. May it be said when I die, He was a man of integrity.

Thanks a lot. So I can install the raid drivers if I like, but I'm pretty much stuck with using an internal FDD. Nuts.