building my first computer

[sloth_13]

i havent started building yet, but this weekend i will start. my question is in regards to something a friend told me in iraq. im using sata hdd's and he said that your system wont recognize them right away and you need to install an aftermarket something for them to be recognized? i cant really remember what he said, but if someone could please explain to me how i would go about making it so my computer will recognize my drives and boot from there after ive loaded my OS.

 

[slicessoul]

Depends on what mainboard you have.

 

[sloth_13]

asus

 

[axilon]

It isnt as wholly confusing as you might think. It really relies on telling windows (with the SATA drivers) that there are in fact SATA drives! Simple as popping in a floppy disk with drivers in during the initial setup of the windows install.. (Press F6)! When the drivers are installed, windows will access the drives!

 

[slicessoul]

Asus made lots of mainboard. Be specific.

What S-ATA HDD ? Capacity ?

 

[The_Prophecy]

It isnt as wholly confusing as you might think. It really relies on telling windows (with the SATA drivers) that there are in fact SATA drives! Simple as popping in a floppy disk with drivers in during the initial setup of the windows install.. (Press F6)! When the drivers are installed, windows will access the drives!

If you slipstream SP2 into the XP disk (assuming XP is involved here), you don't need floppies, since the necessary SATA drivers are already included. There are a couple exceptions to this though, one of them being where the drive is connected to a third party SATA controller like Silicon Image.