I recently wanted to fit a new SATA drive into an older Compaq PC with a A7VBX-LA motherboard.

I thought: hey, its got 2 sata sockets on the motherboard… no problem.

Well, I find XP cannot see the SATA drive.

OK, that should be easy: just change the bios setting to make SATA emulate IDE (or even jumper the HDD to 1.5Mb/s as well.

Nope, there is no way the bios can detect the drive.

I search the web and find an interesting situation: Apparently Compaq commissioned Asus to develop this motherboard… SATA support was not part of the deal.

I’m guessing that Asus slightly modified an existing motherboard to suit.

But now, nobody is taking responsibility for “developing” any bios updates.

So now the A7VBX-LA could support SATA drives, but nobody is going to update the bios to do so.