grassisblue

i recently purchased a MSi ms-6741 754 pin motherboard to replace an old, fried board. the original board had onboard sata support, the new board, has gateway bios A6741vg1 v. 3.5. with no apparent sata support in the BIOS. the bios has no options for sata, but i want to try and flash it to prevent having to buy an IDE hard drive, as my original sata hard drive is still fine. is it possible to flash the BIOS even though there are no options to do so in the BIOS screen? I was told by MSI support they couldn't help because of OEM obligations, and told that if i tried to flash the BIOS it would destroy my board. i have no operating system installed yet, and when i try to install XP from the disc it tells me there is no disc found when i get to the part where i partition my hard drive. the buck stops there and i have been scouring the internet for solutions to no avail. i am a self-tought intermediate user with past success in BIOS flashing, but i'm at the end of my rope and would love to get some good feedback from bona-fide computer geeks.
please help and be blessed!
grassisblue
ps forgot to mention: the mobo does have two sata ports, but when reading the fine print AFTER i bought it (OUCH!!!) it said sata not supported with gateway BIOS.