Installing SATA Controller & Drive in XP Machine

[veritasffg]

With advice and suggestions from this forum, I ordered a 500 gb Seagate SATA II drive for an aging XP machine.  A friend gave me a Sabrent (I think) PCI SATA controller board, plus a driver disk dating from 2005.  This disk has a minimalistic help file, with SATA drivers for various platforms, including XP.  I suspect there are newer drivers (the controller has a VIA chip), and the instructions for installation are, at best, confusing.  I managed to find some sketchy info at the VIA website.  This info seems to indicate that a new install of Windows may be necessary to get the system to recognize the new SATA drive.    If the target PC has SP3 installed, but has never had a SATA drive, is a new or repair install of Windows necessary to get the new SATA drive installed and functioning?  I've read various articles, some of which seem to indicate a new, or repair, install of XP is necessary - and at least one source indicates that if SP3 is already installed, a repair or new install won't be required.  Maybe one of you Windows experts can answer this off the top of your head - or at least point me to an authoritative SATA to XP reference source.

Thanks in advance.

[veritasffg]

To update my original post - Yesterday, I finally received the new SATA hard drive which I ordered a week earlier.  Because I used it to replace (as opposed to augment, or add to), the PCs original IDE drive, I was required to do a clean install of XP on the new SATA drive.  The old Sabrent PCI SATA controller worked, and the old driver included with the card installed without major problems.  All my questions (except one) seem to have been resolved by going thru the steps of the process itself.  The one issue, minor as it seems to be, is just a little irritating,  When the machine is booting up, I see a screen which says that no Drive 0 has been found; immediately afterward there is a screen which announces the model number of the Seagate SATA drive which I installed; then two beeps are sounded; then a screen prompt to press F1 to try to boot again or F2 to enter setup.  At this point, I press F1 ever so briefly, after which the machine boots from the new SATA drive in a completely normal fashion.  Since this is my first experience with booting a SATA drive from a PCI controller, I don't know if this is normal behavior during bootup, or if there is some switch or setting I can adjust which would make the F1 key press no longer necessary.  I would appreciate any relevant info which forum participants may provide.