Warning about Asus A8V deluxe...

[Nubius]

MSI KT6V, forgot the exact ASUS model though, AF7N or something close to that

 

[Alex81388]

Get an Abit Av8 instead.

 

[VIII]

for every single piece of hardware theres gota be at least one bad experience whether the item is faulty, or whatever.. which is why its annoying when people post sayin STay away from this coz for the majority of people dont experience problems, and tis stopping some people from buyin a kick ass board. puts doubts in their minds

 

[4W4K3]

I prefer MSI orer ASUS as well most of the time. The neo2 Platinum is an awesome board, and i'd take it over the A8v personally

Just a note, installing SATA drivers during Windows install is a problem for any type of system. I've heard SocketA rigs screw themselves over doing it, and A64's apparently have the same problem. Nothing new really...

I guess mine's not true SATA, since it takes an adapter to work, but all i did was pop it on and boot up, install drivers, and it worked. True SATA HDD might require more though...

 

[Nubius]

That's because you already had windows up and SATA drivers installed 4W4K3. When you are doing it on a fresh format it can be a hassle, although I've never had a problem with it installing my SATA drive (pure SATA not the adapter although not a 10K rpm drive) but I've had no problems with it on this board or the MSI Neo2-Platinum I installed a couple 10K rpms in.

Also yeah it's lame when someone has one bad experience and calls it crap, but I've had a couple different ASUS boards and they just didn't live up to my expectations and what I mainly tell people is that their tech support sucks really bad IMO.

 

[4W4K3]

That's because you already had windows up and SATA drivers installed 4W4K3. When you are doing it on a fresh format it can be a hassle, although I've never had a problem with it installing my SATA drive (pure SATA not the adapter although not a 10K rpm drive) but I've had no problems with it on this board or the MSI Neo2-Platinum I installed a couple 10K rpms in.

it seems like it would just be easier to run HDD on IDE and install Windows, then after you are done switch to SATA...wouldn't it? If there are problems running straight from SATA i would just do IDE then SATA. (A true SATA HDD will work on IDE won't it?) <--lol that might be why you cant switch...

 

[Nubius]

You can't do that. A SATA drive has a completely different and MUCH smaller connector for transfering data.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=12-104-655&depa=0

Theres what your SATA cable looks like. Much smaller than your normal IDE cable.

They also use a different power connector, BUT they have both a SATA power connector and your standard 4pin molex. You connect one or the other, not both though. They do this incase you have a PSU without the SATA connector although they do sell 4pin to SATA adapters.

Simply put IDE and SATA are two completely different things and you can't install windows on an IDE drive, and then just switch to SATA because SATA is a completely different drive, not just a 'mode' or setting.

You gotta install the files on the SATA drive just like the IDE, but you gotta hit F6 at the beginning of the windows installation and it'll ask you to load SATA/RAID drivers from your floppy.

 

[southernlady]

I posted this in another thread the other day about a SATA setup:

You need to configure it as either RAID 0 or RAID 1. Instruction is normally shown up in the screen during POST. If the mobo accepts SATA as a single then it will report as such at every POST. Thus I think it paid to check it out.

If the SATA is reported correctly by the BIOS thereafter you repeat what you have done before and XP will be bootable.

XP needs the SATA drivers up front or else it could not recognise it at all.

This RAID Tutorial describes at least 9 levels of RAID system.

I think you may need RAID 1 to work the SATA as a single (mirror mode so that the second disk if attached duplicate everything the first does).

I have mentioned caution on RAID. Your RAID 0 is in striped mode where you request your files to be halved so as to be shared by two disks. Thus you can cutdown the hard disk access time by half and speed up its performance (twice as fast theoretically). Depending on the RAID drivers you may have difficulty to persuade your board to support a single SATA if it was never designed for such an event.

And this was written by a technician friend of mine when I was trying to help another get his SATA drive working, his was a SOLO SATA not a combination tho.

THIS IS A HARDWARE problem; installing the SATA drivers with the F6 key as WinXP loads is all fine and good, but you HAVE to correct the CMOS settings in order to be able to BOOT from the SATA drive.

You CAN'T use EITHER of the RAID SETTINGS; you're ONLY using the one SATA HARD DRIVE, so RAID is NOT an option, though you probably know that. Any RAID array requires at LEAST two drives, and I understand that you want to move your original IDE drive to another system. That should NOT be a problem, once you get the CMOS settings to BOOT from the SATA drive.

FWIW, when PCI RAID and ULTRA ATA (high-speed) PCI controller cards first became cheap and widely available about four years ago, many people could NOT get them to work, because they did NOT understand how to configure them in the CMOS settings. Many motherboards did NOT have a setting dedicated to booting from those add-in cards, because the BIOS was developed BEFORE the add-in cards were so plentiful.

The engineers who developed the add-in cards needed a way to make their new cards work with the motherboards already in use worldwide; in order to do THAT, they knew that they had to make the add-in controller cards work with a CMOS setting that was ALREADY available in most of the modern BIOS chips, and they decided to use the "SCSI BOOT" option to accomplish that.

Their solution was simple, though it seemed BIZARRE at first; in order to get the add-in controller card to work as a boot device, they programmed the BIOS chips which would be installed on the add-in cards to LIE to the motherboard BIOS chip! The BIOS chip on the card FOOLS the motherboard BIOS chip by identifying itself as a SCSI device. When that happens, the motherboard BIOS does NOT try to boot from any IDE devices that are attached to the motherboard. Instead, it allows the add-in card to handle the bootup process, and goes to work handling the floppy disk, the modem, and anything else it can locate.

All the computer builder had to do was to install the add-in card in a PCI slot, and then enable the "SCSI BOOT" option in the CMOS settings; the add-in card BIOS would trick the motherboard BIOS by identifying itself as a SCSI device during POST, and the motherboard BIOS would stop looking for a boot device. The add-in card BIOS would then take control of the devices attached to it, and boot the system when it found an IDE device which contained an operating system. Once boot up begins, the add-in card BIOS signals the motherboard BIOS that it can now activate the other hardware in the system. The motherboard BIOS then continues polling to see if there is a modem installed, or a printer attached to the parallel port, and so on.

For the end-user, this all meant that you ALSO had to enable a CMOS setting that allowed a SCSI device to boot the system. As I've already mentioned, when that setting was ENABLED, the MOTHERBOARD BIOS handed off control to the add-in controller card; the motherboard BIOS is designed to allow ANY device enabled through the "SCSI BOOT" option to have control of the boot process, once the "SCSI BOOT" option was initialized by the motherboard BIOS.

Think about that for a moment; the motherboard BIOS does not "KNOW", and does not CARE, if a NON-SCSI device takes control; how would the motherboard BIOS "know" if an ELEPHANT was attached to the add-in card? It WOULDN'T "know", it wouldn't CARE, it is only a ROM chip, and if the CMOS setting requires the "SCSI BOOT" option to be enabled, it WILL be enabled; whatever happens to the boot device AFTER that is NOT handled by the MOTHERBOARD BIOS. All OTHER devices (the CD-ROM drive, the floppy drive, etc.) WILL be handled by the motherboard BIOS, but the BOOT DEVICE, whatever it may be, is handled by the "SCSI" device in the PCI slot, whether it is actually a REAL SCSI device or something else entirely. The motherboard BIOS simply activates the "SCSI BOOT" option by way of the CMOS settings, and the BIOS chip attached to the ADD-IN card takes over control of the boot device.

What that means is that you have to locate the CMOS setting that will allow you to boot from the SATA drive. Since I have no way to see the manual for your motherboard, I can't SPECIFICALLY advise you on which setting to change, but it will OBVIOUSLY be related to the BOOT DEVICES. SOMEWHERE in there, you SHOULD see an option that allows booting from a SATA drive, or it might be marked as a "SATA / RAID BOOT DEVICE" or "RAID / SATA BOOT DEVICE", or by some OTHER label entirely, but UNTIL you find and ENABLE it, you WON'T be able to BOOT from the SATA drive, and WinXP will FAIL to install the first time it reboots during the installation process, since the SATA drive is NOT (yet) considered a boot device by the motherboard BIOS. HOWEVER, once you find the right CMOS setting and change it to ENABLE booting from the SATA drive, everything will work as you expect it to.

Well, what do you know, ANOTHER highly detailed post from me, but one that I feel is required to (hopefully) UNDO the damage I've caused in this thread, simply because I did NOT take the time to give Liz a COMLETE answer when I had the opportunity. To be honest here, I've actually SIMPLIFIED the explanation of how this entire process occurs, but with any luck, you now know all you need to know to understand what happens, and how you can MODIFY your CMOS settings to make your SATA drive the boot device.

Look at what I've given you here and see if any of this helps. Liz

I was trying at one point to slipstream my SATA drivers into my Windows XP Pro/SP2 cd...Nubius, you remember that conversation? Well, I never figured it out altho I did get the XP and SP2 slipstreamed and on my SATA as the boot disk. I did discover something. I pressed the F6 at the beginning and it LOOKED like it didn't do anything but about halfway thru, it asked for it again and I pressed the F6 key again and it accepted it. This was the slipstreamed version, now remember. Everything worked fine. Liz

 

[4W4K3]

You can't do that. A SATA drive has a completely different and MUCH smaller connector for transfering data.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=12-104-655&depa=0

Theres what your SATA cable looks like. Much smaller than your normal IDE cable.

ah yah that's what mine looks like, cept' it's all black makes sense to me.

 

[EricB]

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=437497#post437497