I'm trying to put a 160-gig SATA and an 80-gig IDE drive in eeh same box. if both were IDE my 160 would be my primary master, my 80 would be my primary slave. However, my 160 SATA drive does not show in my BIOS, (it does seem to be working though, on a mepis live disc) I don't know how to configure the whole master/salve business between the two drives. Should my 80-gig IDE drive be set as my IDE primary master or slave?

Thanks. I hope I wrote the question clear enough :S

You have no need to worry about a master/slave relationship because it does not matter. Your 80-GB IDE drive and your 160-GB SATA drive are on a different interfaces.

Post your motherboard. I would look around your bios more because it almost has to give something on it in there (boot order, mode, etc).

Asus A7N8X deluxe.

I swear it makes no mention of my SATA disc! If I go to change my boot order, it only list my IDE primarya nd secondary masters and slaves. The only indication of how the SATA disc is functioning is little printing on the mobo below the SATA headers. I suspect the BIOS doesn't address it because the mobo is the deluxe version, perhaps the regluar version does not support SATA and they just didn't make a better BIOS for hte deluxe?

Also thanks lenard for the tip. I was beginning to suspect that, but ti's nice to confirm it with someone.

Ok, a few guesses.

Under advanced in bios, make sure "boot other device" is enabled.

Check you sata jumpers per page 19 of your manual.

Some of the early bios versions had poor sata support. What bios are you running?

Jumpers- there is a jumper setting for "enable" and 'disable" of SATA, I had that enabled this whole time.
BIOS version- I'm not sure what version number or whatever I have. I really would prefer not to flash it. it's "Phoenix AwardBIOS"
Advanced BIOS- "boot other device" is [enabled]
I tried entering the "RAID setup utility" that it prompts for during boot. The RAID utility does see the disc and correctly identify it.

here's the real problem though. i want windoze and mepis booting from this disc. mepis will install to it, but the windows installer will not recognize it. ;( Another quality microsoft product.

--edit--
A friend of mine tells me XP just doesn't come with RAID drivers. i need a floppy with the RAID driver on it so that i can install ti when prompter during XP installation. probably a bit more complicated than that, but I think I'm on the right track.

You need the number of the bios. It should be shown as you boot the computer. It may be that you have one of the older versions of the bios. If that is the case, your either flash or live with the situation. It is not that the older versions of the bios cannot use sata, it is that they cannot use them correctly.

BIOS v6.00pg

Looks like the current bios is 1009 and includes a sata update.

http://support.asus.com/download/dow...A7N8X%20Deluxe