Hi,

I was close to buying a SATA HD before I noticed a reviewer mentioning that the SATA drivers have to be installed at the point when XP is being installed via a floppy disk? Is this true? If it is, I am a bit bug*ered as I removed my floppy drive as it was giving me issues (the light would stay on constantly; read/write errors wouldn't let me alter or copy anything to from the drive). Could these drivers be installed via a USB key instead?

A floppy drive with the light constantly on simply means the floppy cable is flipped. Turn it back around and all should be fine.

Some chipsets do not have native SATA ports and some do. Whether or not you need to "push F6 to install third party RAID drivers" while installing Windows depends on your chipset. The more recent ones have native SATA 1.0 or 2.0 ports. Which chipset do you have?

Should you need to use F6 then the only access is by the A: drive, whichever the BIOS reports as A: I have never been able to access a USB pen drive as A: despite a number of attempts to do this. Depending on your BIOS, a USB floppy should work though.

The best workaround I know of is to include the drivers in a home-made slipstreamed installation CD. As saphalline stated - it may or may not be necessary to use F6. If it is necesessary you will know early enough during the installation since the CD will not be able to find the SATA drive to install onto.

My mobo is the ASUS P4P-800SX and it has two S150 ports on the motherboard. I always assumed these were used like plug-n-play devices. I'd be grateful if you could clarify this please.

Cheers

It's the Intel 848P / Intel ICH5 chipset. I'll have a look at the Intel website and see what it says.

I have to do the F6 thing too everytime I clean install on my SATA drive. Easiest thing is to reinstall your floppy drive. I will never let go of my floppy drive. It never let me down and saved me a few times when my system crashed.

The SATA driver installation during windows install is real annoying especially for someone without a second computer to make the driver disk. It's completely unacceptable. I have an ASUS MB also and there is no instruction (concerning this) that comes with it. (side note: ASUS makes good quality products but their documentation sucks)