I didn’t search for hours, but a cursory search didn’t come up with any hits, so here’s my guide to using this (fairly popular?) motherboard. I think it applies to the Asus P5B Deluxe as well.
First, the relevant config info:
* Intel C2D E6600
* 2GB 1.8V GeIL Memory
* NEC 16x Dual Layer DVD drive (*Parallel IDE*)
* Seagate 320GB SATA disk
I had a heck of a time getting started. Everytime I’d load the XP disk, it would get stuck right away and say that it could not load ntoskrnlmp.exe (I’m not sure if that’s the exact filename).
At first, I suspected that this was because the installer did not know how to talk to the special JMicron IDE controller (since that’s the only Parallel IDE port on this motherboard). But in hindsight, it was more likely that my CD was probably scratched. In any case, I used nLiteOS (on another machine) to generate and burn a new installer CD with the jmicron driver on it. This seemed to load fine.
You want to make sure to load the Intel AHCI driver during Windows XP setup, otherwise you’ll be running in a suboptimal configuration. I ended up doing this with a USB floppy drive. The steps are:
# Make sure your main disk controller’s are in ‘AHCI’ mode. This setting is on the main bios screen.
# Disable Legacy A diskette option in BIOS, otherwise A: will always map to the motherboard’s floppy port and XP setup won’t be able to find your disk.
# Turn on USB Legacy device emulation in BIOS. (It appears that you can actually make non-floppy devices look like floppies, so maybe all this can be done with a flash drive).
# Boot using the CD included with the motherboard. It will load a prompt with an option to create a Intel AHCI driver disk. Create a driver disk. Reboot.
# Boot the Windows XP CD, with the driver disk in the A: drive, and right when it starts up hit F6, to tell it you want to add drivers. Oddly, it will seem as if nothing happened (I was confused by this for hours), but eventually, once it gets part of the way through loading the basic drivers, it will get to a screen where you can load your own drivers. Hit ‘S’, and it should show you a list of Intel controller drivers that are on the disk. I’m not sure when it decides to read this disk, and it also appears that you can’t pull drivers from multiple disks (that means that you have to configure your JMicron device in ‘IDE’ mode in the BIOS, or somehow manage to get both sets of drivers on one disk).
# Go through the rest of the install. Keep the driver disk in the floppy drive, since you will get asked for it a few times.
# Once the XP install is done, load a network driver from the driver CD, then go grab the updated JMicron driver and Intel SATA drivers. Once these are installed, you can switch your JMicron device’s BIOS setting to AHCI mode as well.
*Notes*
* If you have a standard floppy drive, the first few steps are not necessary.
* It doesn’t seem possible to first install with the Intel ICH8R disk controller in IDE mode, then switch it to AHCI later. I tried that and XP would reboot itself during boot. If you try to install the SATA drivers while the bios is still in IDE mode, the driver installer complains that your PC hasn’t meant the minimum requirements. I think it’s basically a bug in the installer. It should let you install even if the device isn’t present.
* Hopefully this pain all goes away with Vista.