You're doing something wrong. Not paying attention or something. Whether or not the hard drive you're using is SATA or PATA or what ever, Windows WILL ask you to press F6 to install any RAID drivers before installation begins. Its not going to do it immediately. It will take a few minutes while Windows initializes the OS installation, then it will pause on that screen asking you to press F6 to install the drivers. Just follow the instructions. You're missing that part. Once you get to that part, thats when you put in the floppy. If you put the floppy in and then boot up the computer, the computer will automatically check the floppy for a boot disk. Obviously its a disk with drivers on it, not a boot disk, thats why you were getting the non-system diskett error. Most, if not all of this stuff can be found either on the manual that came with your motherboard, or at the motherboard manufacturer's website. Seems like you're just in too much of a hurry.