Hi, Guest, I understand your pain! I am using an ASUS A7N8XE Deluxe board, virgin-fresh install of XP Pro (+SP1) and an SATA Seagate 80G HDD. Needless to say, it took a while to get it up-and-running; I was up and frustrated until the wee hours of the morning.

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What I had to do was this:
Create a nice pretty partition, basically readying the drive for XP, by using the DiscWizard utility available online from Seagate.
And then (and you'll love this) use a win98 floppy bootdisk w/CD-ROM support (you can easily create one in win98), so that I could copy the necessary files from the ASUS motherboard CD (copy *.* to a: from the \SATA directory (or subdirectory? I forget).
Then, re-start, load the XP setup prog like normal, and press F6 at the appropriate time. Now, this part is a bit confusing and oddly-integrated on MS's behalf, in my opinion: although you successfully hit the F6 key at the right time, the setup screen does nothing to let you know that it has accepted your input. Instead, it continues merrily ahead, loading files, and only when it gets to the appropriate spot in the pre-install, will it ask for you to supply an additional drivers by hitting 'S'.
At that point, direct it to your floppy disk w/the copied SATA files from the ASUS CD. Obviously, that floppy should be a different disk from the previous-mentioned win98 boot disk. And, while this sounds trite, remember not to insert the SATA-info disk until asked.

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If you can't get a win98 boot floppy, any bootable recent MS OS-disk should do, as long as it supports CD-ROM (you'll be reading from the ASUS CD), and file transfer.
You may have to re-install your RAID controller after windows XP is installed. Go figure. You figure that XP would have built-in support for SATA, but not even the presence of the SP1 before install helps.

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Let me know if this solves your problem, or points you in the right direction.
-Contrapaulus213
ASUS A7N8XE Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton" 333FSB
Corsair PC2700 RAM 512 Mb
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
XP Pro (+SP1)
Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 80GB SATA HDD/8Mb cache
Everything else is just as common-fare, Antec case, fans, Logitech mouse/keyboard, etc...
As of right now I still have zero (0) games installed on this machine! Wow, the XP desktop is soooo entertaining! Yes, I'd say that's worth $1000+

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Prospects:
Half-Life, Half-Life2
Quake3, Q3 Team Arena
SOF, SOFII
Black and White 1 & 2
Diablo II
etc.... any suggestions? Don't say HALO!