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[Splinter]

I'm not sure if Epox are still in the mobo business, but the support website is still around.
I've got a weird situation of having supplied a customer with a new sata drive, which he installed himself as a data backup. His master sys drive is ide.
So he phones and says windows doesn't see the drive, I go round and enable 'on chip sata' as secondary and the bios finds it, but with this enabled, xp won't boot.
I go to epox support site and the only sata driver they have is the f6 xp setup sata driver (it's not included in the intel chipset driver package on the mobo install disc), but it's an ftp download and a username and password are required.
How weird is that?
I managed to find the correct input words as 'epoxsupport' in both cases, but this just times out every time. I use FF normally but will try IE next.
I woke up last night thinking about this. How to use an f6 xp setup sata driver when you're not strictly speaking setting up XP, but maybe this is what I'll have to do.
I'm glad other mobo support sites don't work like this.
I'm sure I'll get it sorted though.

Page link for those curious  http://www.epox.com/product.asp?id=EP-4PGM2I

[Wooster]

I think you only need that to install windows on a system that has SATA drives (no IDE).
Surely once windows is installed you should be able to install the driver manually (or it will be detected automatically).

It seems that the IDE drive is being ignored on the boot process for some reason.

Have a look at this
http://www.mysuperpc.com/build/pc_sata_second_boot.shtml

What he's done is set the SATA drive to IDE Third Master to keep windows booting from the IDE drive.

[Splinter]

The system boots to windows loading screen from the ide drive, but the windows boot process hangs and the pc reboots itself.
I agree that the sata chip should be detected by windows once loaded but I can't get that far.

[Wooster]

You can hot swap SATA, so you could boot into windows, plug in the sata drive and hopefully it should detect it and install the driver automagically.

If it doesn't then you could run windows update and see if it pulls the driver down as part of the update process.

[Splinter]

Thanks Wooster mate.
Problem solved. The sata had 4 modes in the bios and I used the 'when all else fails mode' of trial and error and enhanced mode did the trick.
We live and learn.................now I'm trying to configure a wireless router as a repeater in a large house where the cable adsl enters at the attic room, but the existing wifi router signal doesn't reach down to the ground floor. 

[Wooster]

Best of luck with that..

[Splinter]

I decided to bring in a mate on this.
I know my limits.

[Wooster]

 

Matching kit helps, as does doing the homework to see if both AP's are compatible with what you are trying to achieve (WDS).
You'll also need to find somewhere between the floors that gives you a decent signal both ways (up to the base station and down to the clients), Netstumbler is free, so you can run that from a lappy.
It's also worth looking into the possibility of running cat5 between the two and configuring the one downstairs as an AP.
You'll get a bit more flexibility on placement, higher bandwidth and simpler configuration.

[Splinter]

Dead right Wooster.
Kit doesn't match in spite of trying for hours with my LAN expert friend.
The problem is the main wifi router which is crap Noganet. Won't talk to the TP Link.
I'm going to replace it with a Linksys.