I have had some problems installing Windows XP onto a SATA drive for boot on my Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe.

My setup is as follows:
74 gig Raptor on the boot
2 x 500 GB SATA raid-1 for my bootlegs
500 GB drive is just for games and junk, music, etc

Remember, SATA drives are a bit too new for the old XP installer and you need to load drivers from the disk.

Anyway, the install went fine but after the final install sequence upon reboot I would get errors such as “Missing Operating System”. Other times I got lucky and passed that one but then the system would blue screen on boot. Some suggestions were to change your bios settings. This sounds unreasonable as the latest bios has worked fine before this reconfiguration.

It gets really frustrating after four or five reinstalls, with some full formats sometimes just to be sure. Either way. Finally I have come up with a winning solution to get everything going. I had to do was install XP with only the Raptor plugged in. Soon as I did that, it was cake. The bootloader was getting screwed up because of how the system reads the BIOS for SATA drives.