[1lacca]

So I have an Asus A7N8X DELUXE motherboard. It has some PATA ports (only optical drives on them), and 2 SATA integrated (2 SATA hdds in RAID 0 on them). I've bought a new SATA hdd, and a PCI SATA controller. To my surprise, the PCI card is initialized first, so the BIOS wants to boot from the new hdd. Is there a way to change the initialization order (I've tried putting the card into different PCI slots, but that didn't work), so the integrated controller takes precedence, or the only solution is to put the old hdds onto the add-in card, and plug the new hdd onto the integrated one? (I am a bit afraid of this option, and I am not sure, what would happen in Windows, because there is a driver CD in the package, so it might not even recognize it - the controller chip is the same as the one integrated onto the motherboard, but I doubt that it would help, since I suppose the PCI vendor id and other things are still different)
The BIOS boot order option only says SCSI, so I can't set it there

[Thorian]

did you fire up windows with out the drive connected first? that way the boot loader recognizes the controller with out a disk before you try to add a new HDD

[1lacca]

Didn't think of this one, but I'll give it a try. Thank you for the idea!
On a side note, I've felt brave this morning, and tried plugging the raid drives onto the card. It looked promising, it booted windows (although it felt a bit slow, but maybe just because of the tension). However the login seemed to stuck. The desktop didn't appeared for 20 seconds, and this was the time I've chikened out. I've rebooted, and the card(together with the system disks) wasn't initialized by the BIOS. I've put the disks back onto the integrated controller, and Windows booted normally (except for trying to run scandisk). Do you think that I should have waited more? I am a bit afraid of activities like this since my (soft)RAID was destroyed by some CPU malfunction once.
Actually I've run a couple of searches on google, and there seems to be several problems related to something like this, but mine seems a bit more complex - I'll check if there is an updated BIOS, that might have more options on selecting a boot device (I've seen that Gigabyte mobos do have an option, to set the initialization order of add-in cards, so let's hope ASUS has come up with something, too)

[1lacca]

I was in my experimenting mood again today, so I've tried what Thorian suggested, but without the new harddisk connected to the integrated controller. However to my greatest surprise LILO stopped at LIL. So no matter how stupid it sounds, I've put the new drive onto the integrated controller, too, and lo and behold, I could boot into Windows, and the controller was installed without even asking for a driver CD and it looks just like the integrated one in the device manager. Everything seems to work fine so far, thank you for the idea Thorian!
(But I don't have a clue, what stopped poor LILO when the integrated controller didn't have a hdd attached... because if it tried to load anything from that, it would have no luck at all, since it is not formatted. The man says:

Quote

LIL The second stage boot loader has been started, but it can't load
the descriptor table from the map file. This is typically caused by a
media failure or by a geometry mismatch.

but it would make sense only in the opposite scenario. maybe if the new hdd is set to be bootable my story will continue...)