Booting from SATA hd on Asus M2N4 SLI

[BMW2000z]

I have 1 IDE drive and 1 SATA drive on the mobo. When i disconnect the IDE drive, and set the bios to boot from my SATA drive and reboot, it gives me an error "insert system disk". when i connect the IDE drives, and then go into the bios to set it to boot from the SATA again, as soon as i reboot, it boots from the IDE drive which has an XP installation on it. i searched the forums on the asus website, but they're useless. a lot of people seemed to have this problem but nobody had any fixes for it. Anybody here have some good advice for this asus board?

ps. the sata drive has a vista install on it, that i somehow got on there in the beginning, and the ide has an xp install from my old computer. for some reason it boots into xp with no problem, but i can't get it to boot off my sata. thanks.

 

[will889]

your SATA unless ACHI controlled will act as IDE devices even though SATA (IDE legacy mode) -- so you might need to check your bios again and make sure you have raid disabled with all SATA enabled and make sure any (IDE mode emulation) is also enabled.

 

[BMW2000z]

thanks for the suggestion. i don't know what i did, but all the sudden it started working properly. and it now recognized my sata drive and can boot to it even without any ide drives plugged in. and i didn't install any new drivers or controllers. it's weird.