Any of you guys built a pc using this motherboard and a serial ATA hard drive? I put one together last weekend and damn was it a pain in the ass. I'm hoping that someone has did this before and maybe I just did things ass backwards? Is there an easier way than what I had to do?
First off the chipset doesn't "see" the SATA drive at all in bios. In the bios options for boot order you can choose HDD-0 through HDD-3, none of those seem to be the SATA drives.
Once I go to install Win2k on it the Windows setup doesn't see the drive either. So I mess around with it for awhile, start surfing for help online (the manual says NOTHING about this), and either on the Western Digital site or ASUS site I find something saying that I need to load drivers for the chipset during the setup as if it was RAID (its not). However, there is no floppy provided with the motherboard to do this. So I download the drivers for it, take a guess at which files it needs (the readme with the drivers just said when to install them, not what files I needed), put them on a floppy and install Win2k on it.
So now I plug in my oold drives again and try to boot so I can transfer files over to the new hard drive. On the ASUS site they say SATA has a higher priority than ATA hard drives. Wrong answer, it just wants to load from the old hard drives and no matter what the boot settings I choose in the bios that never changes. So I unplug the SATA drive, try to boot and it crashes with a blue screen stop error.
I end up installing Win2k on the old partition that used to be for my swap file so I can get my files moved to another safe partition and delete the Win2k one. I format the Win2k partition, then move all the files I want to keep back there, and used fdisk to delete all the partions except the one with my saved files.
Plug in the drive again, try to boot and I got some error saying that ntldr was missing or something. By this time I'm pissed off and wondering why I bothered with SATA and just install Win2k onto the old drive again, network it with my sager and put all the files I want to keep on it and delete all the partitions.
Then I plug in the SATA drive again, and try to boot......... nothing. I have no idea where or when but somewhere along the way it had lost the partition setup I had installed on it earlier, even though Win2k setup, the bios or fdisk could not see it one of them must have erased the partitions.
So I installed Win2k all over again, and finally got it all together and working without losing my files and now I'm wondering, did I just do it all the hard way and is there an easier way to have done this? and for gods sake, why the hell doesn't ASUS put a floppy with SATA drivers? and something ANYTHING in the manual about installing an OS to SATA drives on the A7N8X?
I have always used ASUS motherboards for my desktops since I started building my own, but this exp. might make me rethink that next time.
First off the chipset doesn't "see" the SATA drive at all in bios. In the bios options for boot order you can choose HDD-0 through HDD-3, none of those seem to be the SATA drives.
Once I go to install Win2k on it the Windows setup doesn't see the drive either. So I mess around with it for awhile, start surfing for help online (the manual says NOTHING about this), and either on the Western Digital site or ASUS site I find something saying that I need to load drivers for the chipset during the setup as if it was RAID (its not). However, there is no floppy provided with the motherboard to do this. So I download the drivers for it, take a guess at which files it needs (the readme with the drivers just said when to install them, not what files I needed), put them on a floppy and install Win2k on it.
So now I plug in my oold drives again and try to boot so I can transfer files over to the new hard drive. On the ASUS site they say SATA has a higher priority than ATA hard drives. Wrong answer, it just wants to load from the old hard drives and no matter what the boot settings I choose in the bios that never changes. So I unplug the SATA drive, try to boot and it crashes with a blue screen stop error.
I end up installing Win2k on the old partition that used to be for my swap file so I can get my files moved to another safe partition and delete the Win2k one. I format the Win2k partition, then move all the files I want to keep back there, and used fdisk to delete all the partions except the one with my saved files.
Plug in the drive again, try to boot and I got some error saying that ntldr was missing or something. By this time I'm pissed off and wondering why I bothered with SATA and just install Win2k onto the old drive again, network it with my sager and put all the files I want to keep on it and delete all the partitions.
Then I plug in the SATA drive again, and try to boot......... nothing. I have no idea where or when but somewhere along the way it had lost the partition setup I had installed on it earlier, even though Win2k setup, the bios or fdisk could not see it one of them must have erased the partitions.
So I installed Win2k all over again, and finally got it all together and working without losing my files and now I'm wondering, did I just do it all the hard way and is there an easier way to have done this? and for gods sake, why the hell doesn't ASUS put a floppy with SATA drivers? and something ANYTHING in the manual about installing an OS to SATA drives on the A7N8X?
I have always used ASUS motherboards for my desktops since I started building my own, but this exp. might make me rethink that next time.
