To start off, I am trying to fix my friends computer because his hard drive has failed. He is planning on building a whole new computer in about six months, however he wants to get his current one going until then. I went out and bought a 250 GB/SATA 16Mb buffer Western Digital hard drive and a CP Technologies PCI card to SATA to plug the drive into. His system currently is a Asus A7N8X Motherboard with a 2800 Barton chip. The M/B doesn't have SATA connections so that is why I bought the card. I wanted him to be able to use the hard drive when he rebuilds his system so that is why we went with SATA instead of IDE. Now the problem I am having is that The bios does not identify the drive. I can't install the drivers to get the card to read the drive. does anyone have any ideas for me. Oh and the Coup de Gra is that there is no floppy drive, just a dvd burner.

best thing to do would be to go out and buy a floppy drive. also i not sure if its going to be possiable to boot from the pci device

any jumpers on the card?

You need to stick in the XP cd then hit F6 when it says HIT F6 FOR SCSI/RAID DRIVERS. You will need a floppy disk (only floppies work) with the SATA card driver on it (in .inf format, i think)

You cant install XP on SATA without a floppy (and even then its difficult). I think vista lets you use anything for drivers, cds etc.... and has some SATA support out of the box

Does your computer detect the card own bios? The card bios will post or appear on the screen upon starting. You will need a floppy disk drive to install a card driver.