On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 20:24:52 +0100, Gareth Jones
wrote:

I take it you have the onboard ATA bios enabled? (Must have I guess).
The last bootable device in the list set to 'SCSI / external device' (or
similar) should do it.

*last* bootable device ? We did get it to work, with SCSI, Floppy, CD
as the boot order. We can run SCSI, CD, Floppy as the boot order
also, repeatably.

What did we do ? not 100% certain. Last night we flashed the BIOS of
the mobo up to the latest 1004 from the Asus site (which is later than
the Asus updater tool gets you) - this eliminated an error due to a
slow fan in the system which got rid of POST stoppong each time. This
in itself wasn't enough to make it boot from SATA.
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/downl...lName=A7V600-X

Today we used the latest VIA drivers
http://downloads.viaarena.com/driver...RAID_V300b.zip on a
floppy with the F6 option in Windows, then ran the setup.exe after
Windows had installed using these drivers.

Next we poured over the BIOS screens looking for things that may help
- there is no SATA reference at all and anything RAID specific
(accessed via TAB key after POST) don't work at all with a single
drive.

We did go into the HDD manual setup on IDE2 just looking to see if
maybe we could find something SATA related, we hadn't done that before
and although we left it as we found it it makes me wonder (it was
about the only thing memorably different in 10 reboots).

We did not update anything else before the reboot, so there were lots
of yellow question marks in Device Manager

If you're going to use 2 SATA drives then you get the ATA bios RAID
menus and can select a boot array, but this isn't an option with a
single drive.

The symptoms of our problem were a SATA drive that we had formatted
and used from Windows, installed windows on but could not boot from.
It was a BIOS level issue as Windows never got to try starting as we
sat at a black screen without a boot device working.

Phil