Update: Unfortunately, things have not been any better. I found the SATA drivers on the Asus CD that came with my motherboard. The makedisk was put onto a floppy, and I was all set to install the drivers. When the F6 prompt came up, though, it did nothing. I pressed it several times and nothing happened. Just for the heck of it, I pressed F2 for the recovery console and it went straight to it.
Besides that, I cannot get Vista to install on any HD, even the 250GB drive that it was previously installed on. When it would not install onto the old partition it was previously installed on, I transferred all the files from the other partition to another drive and then completely wiped the 250GB drive. Still, it will not install. It gives the error "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation." I went to this MS help page:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927520 and used the diskpart to completely wipe the drive. The drive still comes up with the same error. I might try what some people are suggesting on others forums and unhook all other drives while trying to do this install. Oh, and the MS page also talks about the setupact.log to see if the drive is active, but it says "access denied" when I try to get into it.
Ive mainly given up on XP on the SATA drive, as there is absolutely nothing else I can think of doing to get it working. It would be nice to at least have Vista installed, but that is turning into a problem of its own.
Edit: When I went to the "load driver" in the Vista installer, I was able to get it to recognize the makedisk on the floppy. All that was there, though, was SATA Raid options. Ive looked all through the Asus CD and can find nothing but SataRaid files. If I end up getting the F6 prompt to work in the XP install, is this what I need for SATA drivers, or do I have the wrong files?
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