I have a new 300G Western Digital SATA II hard drive that I would like to boot from. At the moment it can not be seen in my BIOS though when I boot from my old 20G IDE hard drive the SATA drive can be seen in windows XP.

I have tried many things.

I have tried to install win XP with third party thingy's (F6) during install on the SATA. Can not recognize disk.

My motherboard is a GA-7VT600 1394 F6. Via VT8237. I think I have upgraded my BIOS, well I followed the directions on the CD that came with it for internet upgrade with no problems.

I have put a jumper on 5-6. I have enabled the "onchip serial ATA". I have changed settings from auto to LBA. I have altered boot sequence and changed to SATA (or in my motherboards case SCSI).

Do I need a PCI Express-based host bus adapter?

Pleeeeeaaaaase help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ??? ???

Hi Anne, welcome to itsallPC

The first thing you need to make sure of is that Onboard SATA is enabled in your BIOS. In Integrated Peripherals, ensure that OnChip Serial ATA is Enabled and SATA Mode is set to IDE. When this is done, you will not need to use a RAID/SCSI, as the SATA controller will be functioning in compatibility mode. The HDD shouldn't come up as SCSI anymore.

Go into Advanced BIOS Features, Hard Disk Boot Priority and ensure the SATA drive is before the IDE drive. Boot of the Windows XP CD and proceed as normal. the 300 GB volume should be detected.

I don't know where you got the idea that you need a PCI Express-based controller. You couldn't use one even if you had one for lack of a PCI Express bus. There is absolutely no reason why you cannot use your existing hardware.