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I have tried to get bios to see my sata drive but it cannot see it but windows does it has been formatted within windows XP and is able to be used as extra storage but I want windows to load from it is this possible. I have set the bios to auto but it has no drives found when checking for them
My guess is that, the sata controller option is on a menu option. Mine is on my nforce bios. Sata disks won't show in the normal ide devices screen. Booting from sata should be ok because again in most bios boot options you can select 'bios enabled boot device' or something similar. Once you find the sata controller, you'll probably have to select either sata enabled or sata raid enabled. select enabled for a single hard disk or raid enbled if you have more than one drive and wan't to set up a raid 0 or raid 1 system.
Remember to press F6 (when prompted) during the windows setup to load the sata driver from floppy or you could end up with blue screens and stop 7b errors.
You wont see it in the mainboard BIOS as it has it's own from where the info is passed to the OS, there should however be a line or two in the POST screen showing the controller's BIOS details and it's detection of a device, like the previous poster says to boot to it make it your first boot device after the CD, it may not have an option for SATA or even RAID but SCSI will do fine as they all come under a SCSI 0 ID for boot purposes, make sure you have either the RAID driver or pure ATA driver on a floppy for the F6 bit!
What gemstone say is true if yours is a pci sata contoller but if it's integrated on the motherboard then the options will be in the bios somewhere.
To give a solution we will need to know the motherboard make and model.
I have to agree with gemstone. I run windows off a SATA drive and in my BIOS i have it set to SCSI for first boot. Also like gemstone has posted when you install windows on the SATA drive make sure you have the drivers for your SATA drive on a floppy and when windows starts to install you'll need to hit F6 to install third party SCSI drivers.
Even with mainboard mounted controllers you still wont see the drives displayed in the BIOS, only during the POST and after the OS is installed in the RAID control panel app. It's not part of the main BIOS' job to detect RAID arrays\drives as it's already been done by the controller's BIOS.
This is true but the controller still has to be enabled in the bios, mine is switched off.
Once enabled, then during the post when it's detected there will be a key press combination to get into the contoller bios and setup the disks. The boot order is set is the bios as gemstone says, set it to boot from scsi. As the system bios will see the sata contoller as a scsi device. You might find your contoller is listed in the boot table. A few newer bios's do this. It will then boot from scsi disk 0 or sata disk 1, these being the first in the chain.
And, press F6 when prompted during install and load the sata drivers from the supplied floppy.