Asus A8n-SLI DLX and SATA Optical Drives

[camibofi]

Hello all,

I have a question regarding this board and the usage of SATA DVDRW burners. I would appreciate the community and Asus tech dept. help, if possible.

The manual (which is from Nov.2004) doesn't state nothing about connection SATA optical drives either on the NF4 controller nor on the Sillicon one.

I've been googling the web and found post dated 2005 mentioning that this chipsets (NF4 again) had problem with such interfaces (SATA) on optical drives, and this could be related to driver issues to be corrected. Since then no meaningfull posts where done relating to this.

So my question is, if anyone knows or have it running, a rig with this mobo and a sata DVDRW burner (say the latest Samsung one SH-S203) ?
It is posssible to boot from it? Like the IDE ones ?
In which SATA controller ?

Any help and info on this would be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help
Best regards,
Carlos Figueiredo

My config is the following:

AMD 4600+ X2 CPU - Manchester 939
Asus a8N-sli delux bios 1805
4GB (4x1Mb) Twinmos ddr400
Asus ATI 2900xt VGA
560W PSU
1 IDE LG H20L DVDRW
1 IDE LG DVD ROM (gdr-something)
2 x 160GB Samsung SATA2 RAID on NF SATA controller
1 x 120GB Seagate SATA1 single disk on NF SARA controller
Creative SB Audigy 4

I'm not using the sillicon controller.

[jrmpls]

I am running the A8N-SLI Premium. I ran into some issues trying to sort out the boot and here is what I came up with. I have 2 RAID 0 arrays on the NForce RAID Controller and a Pioneer SATA DVD-RW on the SiI3114 controller.

During Vista install, it will ask you for the driver. Once you give it the driver, the install proceeds as normal.

This is the only way I've ever been able to get Vista install to go forward. Putting the drive anywhere on the NVRAID controller causes lockups or blue screens during or after install.

[camibofi]

thank you for your info.

[LostBok]

a bit late, I know.... but I'm running an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, 3 x HDD on the SIL3114 in RAID5 and 2 x NEC Optical drives on the nV SATA channels (1 and 4).

I can boot off them into DOS / Vista / XP install directories and use them just like any IDE drive.