SATA HD & ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe

I'm getting ready to put together a pc and I'm confused about hooking up a hard drive using a SATA port. Will the system recognize the hard drive on its own or will I have to do something else, like change bios or driver? The manual descibes how to hook up ide HD and how to configure a raid set-up with 2 HD, but I don't see anything about hooking up one SATA HD.

i installed a sata drive on a friends computer and it recognized it and everything. i believe thats all you have to do.but dont hold this against me.its best to ask somebody like karsh or somebody else with more experience with these things.

I agree w/ guitarboy, you shouldn't have trouble. Post back if you do run into a problem.

yay somebody agreed with me.

Thanks, I'll be putting it all together starting Tuesday, so I'll let you know if I have any problems. Thanks for info.

I've got a (shop-bought) system with an ASUS P800 M/B and a SATA disk. It came supplied with XP but have installed Mandrake Linux on it and the disk was recoginised with no problem. Also have a system with the A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo and there is a separate BIOS that recognises the SATA controller. Make sure if you are using PC3200 DDR that it is from the qualified list. I had a problem where I got no video initially and odd problems (continual reboots if you did a restart, wouldn't powere up after shutdown unless A/C was cycled off/on). Asus support wouldn't help until as the memory wasn't qualified (although it came the the P800 ASUS system). Eventually I put in PC2100 memory and got all sorts of POST problems and ASUS finally agreed there was a M/B problem.

Zaphodb

The motherboard did recognized the sata drive. The tricky part came when I was installing Windows XP. Windows asks if you have any 3rd party drivers to install at the beginning, which I had to do in order for the sata HD controller to work. The only problem was the driver had to be on a floppy disc and all I had was the cd-rom that came with the motherboard. Took me a long time to get the right files onto a floppy disc. If it weren't for the internet I would of never known which ones to look for. You would think the motherboard manual would have something about installing a SATA drive, but noooo.

Anyways, after the frustration, all works fine and I'm happy with my new system.

This is exactly my problem. for some reason when I hit F6, then S in XP Install, and insert the ASUS CD, it won't read it. And I figured I'd never need a floppy drive again when buying parts for this comp, since last time I used my current one was 1998. Tonight I'm going to buy one at Fry's - floppy's are like dos, you can never really get rid of it (Unless you install linux).

Monkeysoft seems to have not put any sata drivers in XP sp1 cd. guess sata wasn't around then.

Anyway, from what I've read, use the Via sata drivers - there's somekind of "makedisk.exe" utility either on the asus cd, or downloadable, to make the floppy for the XP Install (don't use the Promise), it's faster and "better" are what they've been claiming about Via.

I literally found about 30 threads on different forums related to this exact issue. You'd think asus would've thrown in a driver we can use with XP install.

PS - ASUS: If you're reading this, fix your site (ie - ditch the flash and javascript), we don't all run that IE crap. Your current "flashy" site just makes it harder for us to find the info we need.

It ain't just ASUS... to ABIT's credit, they at least documented the F6 drivers thingy and provided the freakin' floppy (a year ago for IC7G Max II Advance Mobo)...

It's amazing that Monkeysoft STILL doesn't have SATA drivers in XP SP2 - its getting hard to buy a non-SATA disk for gosh sakes!

Ahh well the arrogance of monopoly...

TheWags

I think if you have XP SP2 it does have sata drivers, at least that's what I read.


You can read about my solution here:
http://www.chovy.com/2004/12/install-sata-hdd-on-asus-a8v-deluxe.html