SATA drivers?

I posted this in the Motherboard/BIOS section, and just in case I copy and paste it here too. I don't want to spam or anything, so if the mods think this is over the top, please delete it.

I am not sure if this or the HDD forum is the correct one, but I guess this will do for now. Smile

First of all, hello all, I am new here.

I bought this new system (I built it actualy) few days ago.
Works, mostly (optical drive problem I will post a thread elsewhere here), but I am wondering about something. The mainboard is the DFI LANparty UT RDX-200 CF-DR. It comes with two sata raid controllers (I am not good at this so...), one is the SB450 and the other is the Silicon 13something. The first for the first 4 SATA drives, the latter for the other 4.
The mainboard came with a 1.4" diskette with the label

SATA RAID Driver Disk
ATI SB450
Silicon Image 3114
Rev.1.0

but I do not have a floppy disk drive, just a dvd drive. So I couldn't install them during installation of Windows XP Home Edition (sp2 slipstreamed)

I have plugged in the HDDs (2 maxtor drives used as different drives C and E) in 2 of the first 4 eh sockets, which belong to the SB450.
I installed some drivers from a cd that came with the mainboard, but I have no idea if the proper sb450 drivers have been installed or not, or how to check for it. In device manager, under scsi and raid controllers it only shows the Silicon one.
I don't know if the drives work fast enough or not and if not how to solve it. This is my first desktop PC since 2000 so I have no idea how this SATA thing and raid work. I just want to drives to work properly fast under SATA speeds (if that makes any sense). Can anyone please help me with this one?
I am thinking of unplugging the HDDs and plugging them to the other sockets of the Silicon Image controller, would I need a fresh install of windows for that? Is it even necessary to do so?

First of all, are you actually trying to run these drives in an actual RAID? From the sounds of it, you are not.

If not, you don't even need to worry about the RAID drivers. If you do want to use them in a RAID, you may need to take the files on the diskette and burn them to a cd, start from scratch, and then you can load them off the cd-drive during windows setup.

(You may laugh with my ignorance on this) I am not interested in running them on RAID. Just that they run faster on SATA than "just" as normal IDE.

Joined: 27 Jul 2007 Posts: 1

I see no way to get windows to look at the cd for driver during install. It Propmpts for F6 to load drivers, then alter demands them from the floppy. does anyone know hoe to get the install to look at the cd/dvd drive.

Fewer and fewer machines have a floppy...

I need SATA drivers for a K8V SE motherboard because my machine fails boot at MUP.SYS. Any thoughts??