I'm putting together a new system which partially includes:

ASUS P5WDH-Deluxe M/B
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
2048gb Mushkin XP2 PC6400 DDR2 800MHz
2 x Seagate Barracuda @ 320gb SATA-II
ATI AIW Radeon X1900

and I have a question!

Although there are 3 Raid Controllers on this m/b, I'm NOT going to use Raid.

If the SATA-II drive(s) are partitioned as FAT32 (non-Raid), can a DOS Floppy Boot disk be used to access these drives for various low-level functions, eg. Ghost 2003, Partition Magic etc. w/o problems?

I understand that SATA drives are shipped in IDE default mode, so the disk could probably be accessed w/o problems at this point.

However, after WinXP Pro is installed/setup in SATA mode with the required Intel® Matrix Storage SATA drivers is DOS access lost? Obviously there are no DOS SATA drivers available, so is it possible to access the drives in a DOS environment w/o drivers?

I really need a definitive answer here.... Two days of research has produced nothing but confusion and conflicting answers!

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi McSAM, welcome to the PCHF

I strongley suggest not formatting using FAT32.
It is slower, less reliable, less secure...

The motherboard should have RAID and non RAID SATA ports. I'll double check this for you...

And to make Ghost work, you just need the boot disk, but FAT32 is not the answer unforunately.

OK, I've done a quick search but couldn't find anythign conclusive.

Basically, I believe the Intel SATA ports are the same as my nVidia ones - they can be either used as RAID or non RAID.

If this is the case, no problems at all. If it isn't the case, you can set up a 'JBOD' type of RAID which you can use 1 disc at a time.

JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks

Thank you VERY much for your input!