Problems booting from SATA DVD drive

[Vidda]

A few months ago my IDE optical drive died and I replaced it with a SATA drive. I installed it with no problem and it has been running fine for months. However, I am about to do a reformat, and am running into problems booting from the drive.

In the BIOS, there is no option to boot from SATA devices at all. I can select my master IDE HDD (has my Windows install) or my floppy drive. If I go down to my list of hard drives, I can see my two IDE drives and also my only SATA HDD (marked as 'VIA RAID 1st HDD'). If I let the load screen run, the RAID configuration flashes on the screen and I see my SATA DVD set to channel 0 and my SATA HDD set to channel 1.

So my question is: How can I get my motherboard to let me boot from my RAID controller?

Specs:
Mobo: ASUS A8V
Drive: LG DVD Burner GH20NS15
HDDs: 2xIDE & 1xSATA
OS: XP Home SP3

Edit: I do have a floppy, so if there is some trick to making it work by booting to floppy, then pointing to the CD, that'll be great too.

 

[CryHavoc]

I've found that on some motherboards, if you plug the sata DVD drive in on any port other than zero, that the pc won't allow a boot from cd, despite being set as the first boot device in the bios.

Moving the DVD drive to port Zero and the hard drive to another port (if applicable) and setting bios to have the boot order reflect the optical drive as first device, PLUS making sure the "allow to boot from other devices" is enabled if necessary, and you should be golden.

 

[mpilchfamily]

There has also been problems in teh past with SATA optical drives and older motherboards. So you may not be able to get teh optical drive working at all.