Do I need F6 disk for non-raid, sata install on DS3?

[artimusbill]

The manual is a little confusing, it doesn't seem that I will need the floppy disk, just set the IDE/SATA to IDE instead of Raid, or ACH(something..). It sounds to me like XP should recognize the drive. Any experience with this board and using a single SATA boot drive? Thanks in advance.

 

[therainman]

Nope.. or at least I didnt. Got mine today and installed xp on a sata hdd without any floppy or other tweaking.

 

[jg0001]

I've only recently been enlightened to the AHCI thing... AHCI is the "newer" native mode of SATA drives. Most mobo's are happy to emulate in IDE mode under which you probably won't have any issues at all. If you want to use AHCI, you'll need an F6 floppy with the proper driver for the CONTROLLER (not for the harddrives) and you'll have to set your BIOS to AHCI mode on the SATA channels.

As I understand it, it really is only beneficial to use AHCI if you are using Sata II drives... otherwise the differences are negligible.

 

[artimusbill]

Thanks for the replies. It doesn't seem to be working for me, even the bios doesn't see either of my sata drives. Been fiddleing with the settings to no avail. The board is also reporting a cpu speed of 533mhz. I am going to through the Vista64 beta on it, and see if I can get the bios updater to work.