BIOS not remembering my SATA drivers

[Perfect Dark]

There have been so many posts about installing SATA drives that were
so close to answering my problem but not quite. Okay, here's the deal,
I just built a new computer:
120GB SATA Western Digital
ASUS A7V600 Motherboard
1GB RAM
AMD Athlon XP 2.1 GHZ
I installed Windows 2000 on the SATA drive no problem, installed the
proper Drivers for the drive to be recognized and it ran fine. Windows
2000 loaded up. After about three days (and after turning the computer
off and on a couple of times) I turned my computer off for an extended
period of time (one night). When I turned it back on in the morning,
the start up hanged on the Windows 2000 boot up screen (in DOS) and
didn't do anything after stopping on the second block of the progress
bar. So, after much trouble shooting, I gave up and reinstalled
windows with the proper drivers so that it could see the drive again.
everything went fine...sure enough, after turning the computer off and
on again, it did the same thing (not reading the drive I'm assuming
because it needs drivers just to read the SATA drive to boot into
windows?).
So the question boils down to, How do I make sure that every time I
start the computer, the motherboard/BIOS reads the drivers that are
already installed and boot into my windows 2000 installation? And
also, is there anyway of booting into windows by just showing the
system the drivers it needs to load to recognize the drive but without
having to go through the whole Windows 2000 setup/Recovery process.
Any help is MUCH appreciated. Thanks!
-John

 

[Rod Speed]

There have been so many posts about installing SATA drives that were
so close to answering my problem but not quite. Okay, here's the deal,
I just built a new computer:
120GB SATA Western Digital
ASUS A7V600 Motherboard
1GB RAM
AMD Athlon XP 2.1 GHZ

I installed Windows 2000 on the SATA drive no problem, installed the
proper Drivers for the drive to be recognized and it ran fine. Windows
2000 loaded up. After about three days (and after turning the computer
off and on a couple of times) I turned my computer off for an extended
period of time (one night). When I turned it back on in the morning,
the start up hanged on the Windows 2000 boot up screen (in DOS)

You presumably mean the black bios screen. There is no DOS with Win2K.

and didn't do anything after stopping on the second block of
the progress bar. So, after much trouble shooting, I gave up
and reinstalled windows with the proper drivers so that it could
see the drive again. everything went fine...sure enough, after
turning the computer off and on again, it did the same thing
(not reading the drive I'm assuming because it needs drivers
just to read the SATA drive to boot into windows?).

Sounds more likely that the drive type entry in the bios is getting lost
and thats the cause of the problem. It can get lost on a power down
when the motherboard battery has gone flat and thats easy to change.

The drive types should be set for AUTO.

So the question boils down to, How do I make sure that every time
I start the computer, the motherboard/BIOS reads the drivers that
are already installed and boot into my windows 2000 installation?

No, the bios does load ntloader and it does the boot proper.

And also, is there anyway of booting into windows by just showing the
system the drivers it needs to load to recognize the drive but without
having to go through the whole Windows 2000 setup/Recovery process.

Not really, and thats not your problem anyway.

 

[Perfect Dark]

Okay, I turned everything having anythign to do with the disk types to
auto and still does the same thing...
there's also an "Onboard ATA device first" option and an "Other Boot
Device" option which I set to SCSI/Onboard ATA Boot disk