cheers boys, gotta tell you i am really liking these forums, it would make sense to me that the drivers for SATA would have to be installed first so the board can "talk" to the drive, because the MB came with a SATA floopy disk.
Had some progress last night fired up and it all worked went into the BIOS (which is achieved with F4 BTW for anyone with a DFI-lanparty NF4 sli-DR) and changed it to boot from CD
put my XP disk in and it ran it, hit enter to begin installation and it stayed on that screen for an hour and a half with nothing happning
so i am wandering at this point is the computer attempting to transfer files from the CD to the hard-drive in which case the solution of installing SATA drivers first sounds plausible
am i right in thinking this?
BTW i will be posting some cool pics of the case and screen etc when i get it working hopefully tonight (fingers crossed)