"Marcus" wrote in message . com...
Is it possible to run 1 SATA drive on this board as the primary drive? It
appears that evenything related to SATA drives are Raid and have to run in
pairs. Am I misunderstanding? There is a Promise Raid Controller and a VIA
Controller that runs raid as well. I just want to setup a 1 SATA drive
system. Can this MB do this?
I have another system with the A7N8X Deluxe and I run it with 1 SATA Drive.

You've probably already got this working - but in case anyone else
needs to know...

You can install your single SATA drive on either the VIA primary SATA
port, or the Promise one. If you install it on the VIA port, disable
the Promise in the Bios (the DEL one, not the TAB one), and vice
versa. I suggest you use the VIA port - no reason except it worked
for me!

Next, make a floppy disk containing the Promise or VIA Raid driver.
Obviously you'll need access to another computer to do this! Run the
makedisk utility in the appropriate directory under 'Drivers' on the
ASUS CD. It tells you to insert a blank floppy, and does a sector
copy so you can't get it wrong by copying the wrong files.

Turn on your (new) computer and press DEL to go into the BIOS. Select
the boot options, and make sure the CD rom is first in the boot order
(you can change it back later once XP's installed.)

Boot from the XP CD. Almost immediately there's a message at the top
of the screen sayig press 'F6 to load additional drivers'. Press it.
It doesn't do anything straight away, but a litle later it will prompt
you to press 'S' to load the additional drivers from the floppy.

When you press 'S', you get a list of VIA SATA drivers. Obviously
select the 'XP' ones.

If you get a message complaining about an error in a particular line
of 'C' code, it's most likely because there's a physical error on the
floppy disk. That happened to me. I went back to the other PC and
made another driver floppy and all was well.

Once XP was installed I immediately loaded the ASUS drivers &
utilities.

There's one other 'gotcha'. If your hard disk is over 137Gb, your XP
boot CD will only format the first 137Gb of it. This is fixed in
SP1/SP2, but that may not be on your XP CD. Two solutions to this...

1. You could live with 137Gb to start with, then reclaim the lost
space with Partition Magic later, after you've installed SP2

2. You could create a bootable XP install disk, complete with SP2
fixes. Google for 'XP slipstreaming', or look at
http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm

I did the second one!

--
Colin