StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Curious about Motherboards and SATA. My machine requires loading a SATA driver from a floppy disk. It is a few years old though (~2005) and curious if this is still the case with SATA drivers?

No. They emulate IDE by default in many cases. I had no problems installing WinXP from disk on my machine two years ago.

From what I know, the floppies are only required if you're installing to a SATA-based RAID array. For normal purposes, you shouldn't need it.

EDIT: It might also be needed if you're plugging into a SATA port that's controlled by a PCI-based controller chip instead of the one built into the chipset, but that's also a pretty rare scenario AFAIK.

It is raid server...
I had to reinstall XP because the "system" file got corrupted after a power crash and did not want to load the raid drivers at first. It did not see a hard drive without them. I think the ribbon cable on the floppy might have become loose because I was able to get the raid drivers to load and it is mostly restored.

Windows won't attempt to install itself on a RAID array (except for RAID-1 drives, I think) without the right driver, to avoid corrupting the data on it. Unfortunately, as you've discovered, having redundant drives saving your data doesn't do jack in case something does happen to corrupt the data.

I have two desktops and a new external hard drive. I have almost everything backed up so I did not lose much in the way of files.