"Dr. Anthony J. Lomenzo" wrote in message
...
[...]
And many websites seem to de facto 'assume' that when you get there you
already savvy a good deal about things to know about SATA and RAID and
unfortunately they proceed from that premise!

As do the motherboard manufacturers.

Having run into a similar problem a year ago, when I put together my first
SATA-equipped PC, maybe my experience will be helpful. On the motherboard,
which did NOT have any SCSI controller, the BIOS settings still referred to
a SCSI controller. Turns out, anywhere it said "SCSI", it actually means
SATA.

So, you may have to enable your "SCSI" controller somewhere, probably in the
XP setup. When XP asks if you have any additional drivers to install, tell
it you do, and then you should have drivers that came with the motherboard
on a CD you can put in when XP asks you to. Alternatively, there may be
something in your BIOS settings to enable the SATA controller and make it
appear as an IDE controller to Windows (since it is basically just a
different kind of IDE controller).

Same thing for booting...you may have to tell the BIOS to boot from the
"SCSI" controller to get it to boot from the SATA drive.

As the motherboard manufacturers update their BIOS, this stuff should be
easier. For now, we're definitely in that "transition" phase. Getting
things to work will take equal measures of plain old fiddling around and
trying to figure out what shortcuts the hardware manufacturers have taken to
get SATA enabled and working.

Pete