Anyone know if Serial-ATA is natively supported in the 64-bit version of Windows XP, or will I have to load the drivers upon installation?
xp 64 loaded the drivers for my sata controller. but it didnt find my nic (but nvidia made drivers for it now)
Depends on a lot going by XP32. I've found that ICH5/r, ICH6/r, NF3 and NF4 (plus probably others) don't need a special driver if you don't have the drives in RAID for normal XP. I'd imagine almost all controllers will always need their own drivers if the disks are in RAID, although MS would be smart to support some of the more common controllers (the above, SI3112, SI3114, etc).
Ive noticed that im less likely to need to install RAID and SATA drives with a SP2 or SP1 disk Vs the ordiginal disk. Im guessing it comes with a updated driver database to make installation easyer. Odds are XP-64 does the same thing.
XP-64 doesn't have VIA sata drivers, but im not sure about Silicon Image ones. If your K8V uses the native Sata then you'll still need to do the old floppy method or slipstream it.
This is one thing i just don't understand. Even with SP2, I have found MS hates SATA - at least for my boards. With RedHat though, they get right in there with the SATA drivers. This must be a first - when Linux has common native driver support before Windows.
tell me about it, windows hates all the things on my mobo, linux installs everything including gigabit lan