Quoting Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com>om>:
With older hardware going up in smoke I have new
machines and
unfortunately you cannot load Win XP on these new machines easily. The
machines do not have floppy drives to load drivers during boot, don't
understand USB well enough to use something else as far as I can tell,
and the XP install disk cannot see the SATA hard drives via new
chipsets so it's all sort of a mess trying to stick with XP.
So far, all new PC's I've encountered still have drivers for XP if you
go to their website.
The trick to recognizing SATA is to set it to "Compatible" instead of
"Native" in BIOS. Once you've installed the proper driver you can set
it back to Native.
If you can't use USB to transfer the drivers after installing XP you
could burn them on a CD.
That said, I understand that getting the RME to work with Win7 and
ALSA would be the best option.