hello everyone:
i have a strange problem
with my old system, i cant install xp sp2 on the sata drive cos i don't have a sata driver
but with my new GA-EP35-DS3L it can be installed so what is the matter? does that mean that the new mobo has sata driver installed on bios?

No that means the SATA M/B headers recognize the SATA drive as an IDE drive unless you enable RAID, done through the CMOS setup.

Thats not really a problem unless you're trying to install XP on the old M/B that very well probably needs the driver to be loaded at the F6 installation prompt, the original driver is on the M/B driver CD, as a Floppy Creator, or can be downloaded from the M/B manufacturers website.

However the driver you load at F6 has to be loaded through the A:\ drive which is the Floppy drive, or you can slipstream it to the installation CD if you don't have a Floppy drive, and another important point is if there are more than 1 driver on the Floppy, load them all, full instructions are there at the F6 load program.

The SATA drivers on the mobo CD are for the Gigabyte SATA controller (in the OP's case). But, most users will want the ICH9R SATA drivers which have to be downloaded either from the Gigabyte or Intel websites.

I prefer to have a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD with the SATA drivers - if I can figure out how...

thank you guys you are the best