did what u described and shuved everything up in the cd(all the drives) just to make sure, al all i got was a black screen after the press any key to start the setup... after 4 cd tries i got it to load in windows(using the mkisofs system at iso creation stage... great). it still gives me the black screen on dos, and doesnt solve anything. its curious how there are many people with this problem around teh forum, but no real post on it... any direction on this would be fine, i did exactly what u described and ONLY that, no nothing extra in the way. then i reboot, enable ahci and it loads the cd... pres key, etc.... the blakc screen! weird... also i know that everything in the pc is fine, actually the reason why ii want sata-mode on is because i can use it on gentoo(linux) so, instead of turning it off when i need to use windows, ti would be good if i could run windows with the sata enabled... thank for ANY response this really is becoming a dead end for me. edit: im using v1.4.5 beta 2 btw...