Abit KW7 BIOS trouble
 

Abit KW7 motherboard has a fault in the most recent version of BIOS (1.1, built date 10/01/2004). The problem is inability to boot OS from any SATA drive. Installing a driver for SATA during OS setup init will make no help. SATA drives cannot be seen under BIOS setup but they are accessible for Windows XP setup. Installation works until the first restart which reveals either an error message or blank screen. Can somebody help me to defeat Abit?

flash to an older revision?

I'm afraid there's only one version of BIOS available on the Net. The release v. 1.1 was built at 10/01/2004 and now we can see no changes for 2 month... See the link.
http://www2.abit.com.tw/page/en/download/download_detail.php?pFILE_TYPE=Bios&pMAIN_TYPE=Mot herboard&pTITLE_ON_SCREEN=KW7&pSOCKET_TYPE=Socket+ A

So sad I have to buy an external SATA controller. :mad:

1.1 is indeed the first BIOS release :/

That's the trouble! :super:

KW7 sata boot issue
 

In bios, under IDE - change SATA mode from IDE to RAID.
Also, during boot process, enter NIC bios settings screen, and set to: local disc only.
Finally, set bios boot order to standard type: floppy, hard disc, and cdrom. And enable Boot to other devices.
It works for me.
BTW: i'm pretty disappointed with this board in many ways. It benchmarks poorly in the important ways (memory speed, sata speed). But, it does definitely 'seem' faster than my kd7.