sata boot

My mobo is listed in my sig.. In bios, it doesn't seem to allow me to boot with SATA, it only lists the usual (ide0, ide1, cdrom, etc.), but no SATA.. When booting, the system looks for SATA drives right before windows starts, but well after IDE detection (in fact, my external Promise IDE controller (ultra133) is detected before SATA, even though the SATA is internal). I don't have a SATA drive right now, but am thinking of buying an ultra fast drive for my OS drive (like 18 or 36gig is more then enough, I have over 200gb of storage space via big 7200rpm drives). I want to know if my mobo will allow me to boot from a SATA drive, if not, it is basically useless.. If it is possible, how would I set it up? Am I overlooking something in BIOS?

Finally, can I expect a big difference in boot time and running games etc, if I run all my software/programs/games from the Seagate 10000rpm 8mb cache fast drive, as opposed to my Maxtor 2mb cache 7200rpm drive? thanx in advance.

I just installed a 74 gig 10,000 rpm Raptor yesterday, with my A7N8X Deluxe. I really like it (would definitely buy it again), performance is simply awesome. I went to the ASUS website and downloaded the SATA drivers to a Floppy. When I started loading XP Pro, it said push F6 to load a third party driver. Pushed F6 & stuck the floppy in. The rest of the install was just like normal.
After Windows was loaded I went into bios and picked SCSI as the first boot device ( someone at Extremeoverclocking advised me to do this). Runs great !!!

Thanx a lot.. That makes perfect sense, it will definitely work, I should have thought of it myself, and I probably would have if I had the drive here.. Still, a BIOS update would be nice, to include "boot from SATA" and "boot from SCSI" along with all other possible options.