The problem now is with the owner and the reluctance to even plug in the 200gb sata drive in order to give some working ideas a go. I told him that all he had to do until the drive saw Windows running was simply unplug the ide drive loaner he's still running. There was a mood shift there somewhere since he originally wanted a sata only case. Recently when going through the options on the Asus board here besides boot device order you scroll down to hard drives and press enter to see that menu open.
Once the new sata was seen as the only drive with the others unplugged the installation went right on. There isn't an option for SMART Sata since SATA 2 is enabled by default as well as SATA 2 DMA Transfer. But this is the way Asus has it on the A8N-SLI model here. The pdf version of the manual is seen at
http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/...68_a8n-sli.pdf
Gigabyte has their own settings on their models while non plug'n'play or the non-OS2 option is set when going to install Windows on an Asus board. Meanwhile the manual for the Gigabyte model Kornowski has mentioned is found in downloadable form at
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/M...l&FileID=17369
Once you review the download you should see the options on that model for setting a sata drive as the default or first in the boot order. Once you have the board installed in the new build it will be easier to follow the information seen in the manual since you have the actual bios staring back at you. You can easily browse through the different sections there and note the options. Once I have the other case setup with the sata there I can run right that bios fast enough. Until then it's upto the owner. The first thing you will need to start off with is a working floppy drive however to create the driver disk as soon as the new board comes in. In the meantime download a copy of the manual to be a little more familiar with the bios settings. The rest goes easy enough when you have a good disk and the settings correct. Windows will go on like you had an ide drive after the sata drivers are loaded.