Can't Boot Off SATA Card

How can I be sure? I emailed ABIT tech support but got no reply. Promise SATA cards are supposed to boot anything but they are pricey & I don't want to throw good money after bad.

There is no SATA option in the boot order but under Add In Cards, there is an option to boot from PCI slot device, It didn't work. According to ABIT website, I have the latest BIOS version.

here all drivers, downloads and FAQ's :  http://www.viaarena.com/http://www.viaarena.com/
did you try booting on a clean disk ? without OS?

"If this is possible try grabbing any SCSI controller or IDE at least (for example with Silicon Image SIL0680 chip) and look for card's bios during the boot process"

I don't understand the above, I will return the card to Amazon & buy an Adaptec.

I mean, try inserting any other hard disk controller, like SCSI, IDE on PCI, and when computer boots up, the controller's BIOS should pop up. If not, it means, that the mobo doesn't support booting from PCI.

However this is highly unlikely.

I don't have any controller cards lying around but if I press F4 on boot-up, a control panel pops up for configuring RAID, is that the SATA card BIOS?

The card also has an IDE socket.

Yes, it is boot bios. Then it MUST boot from it! In BIOS, in boot sequence, write down all device that are listed (like SATA/IDE disks, CDroms, lan, etc. There should be either PCI, or SCSI setting, or directly name of a disk that is connected to the controller.
Completely different thing is - does the controller acutally sees in that raid config panel your disk?

Here is the boot sequence:

CDROM
HD
LS120 (Tried it)
FDD
Disabled
LAN
USB-CDROM
USB-ZIP
USB-FDD
ZIP100/ZIP250

Here are the card BIOS options:

Create RAID set
Delete
Rebuild Mirrored Set
Resolve Conflicts - No conflicts exist!

The SATA HD connected to the card, does not show up in the card BIOS, the other drives do.

I have 3 HD's in Mobile Racks: SATA HD 1/SATA HD 2/IDE HD 3, the SATA HD attached to the card is inside the PC case. I thought of swapping them around but this configuration, allows me to remove a particular drive without having to open the case. I think I will swap them anyway because that is the logical thing to do, however I would still like to learn how to boot off a SATA card, for the future.

I did try re-installing Windows but couldn't get it to load the card drivers off the manufacturers CD. I have tried slipstreaming with nLlite before but it failed, I'll give it another go.

I got the information below here: http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,87053.0.html

"PCI's standard bandwidth is 133MB/sec, SATA is 150MB/sec, and SATA II is 300MB/sec. In other words, the original SATA standard saturates the PCI bus, so there's no point in having a SATA II card."

I'll just swap drives & use the PCI SATA for storage, what I really need is a new Motherboard.

The pop-up wasn't the Mylink SATA card BIOS, it was the utility for the SiliconImage Motherboard SATA driver. After I installed an Adaptec 1210SA SATA card, I noticed a boot prompt "press Ctrl A to enter Adaptec configuration utility".

>>   the original SATA standard saturates the PCI bus   <<  completely wrong ! it means only it can handdle transfer speeds that high.  your disk won't come near it - you're lucky to reach 80-90 MB/s

WD VelociRaptor:

Transfer Rates: Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) - 3 Gb/s (Max)
Physical Specifications: Interface - SATA 3 Gb/s

Specs: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=499

I swapped the SATA drive cables over, the old drive (WD Caviar) shows up in the Adaptec SATA PCI card BIOS but not in Windows Explorer or Device Manager (Adaptec card is in Device Manager), even after uninstalling & re-installing the driver. I swapped the cables back & Windows sees all the drives. What is going on?

I phoned Western Digital tech support & asked them why Windows could see the Velociraptor HD & not the Caviar. They said that the Velociraptor was setup for Raid & suggested I try a non Raid card. I decided on the Promise SATA-300TX2-Plus.

http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?product_id=138

The Promise card worked! Using the CD I created a driver Floppy, which I used along with the SiliconImage Floppy after pressing F6 during a Windows install, this gave me the option to install Windows(I didn't, it was a test). I suspect the Adaptec card would've worked as well but I didn't have the installation CD to create the driver Floppy, I tried using the driver files from the Hard Drive but that didn't work.

Anyway, I swapped the cables back & can now see the Caviar as secondary when attached to the SATA card. The original Windows installation on the Velociraptor boots off the Motherboard, so I now have 2 bootable drives. I already have Puppy Linux installed on a USB Stick & if I add the Velociraptor to the Grub bootloader, I should have the option to boot into 3 OS's.

Thanks for the comments, I got there in the end (3 SATA cards later, oh well, off to eBay!)

if you want  to know your transfer speed , try atto :  http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/123/mirrors.php
have fun !