Installing XP Pro w/SP3 onto a SATA drive

I've been looking around on Google and it seems XP Pro doesn't support SATA unless you slipstream the driver onto XP.

Is that the case? Or will it work fine with a copy of XP Pro w/SP3 slipstreamed onto it?

The mobo I'll be buying/using is P5Q-Pro and the Sata Drive will be 750gb Samsung.

 

It will depend on the controller you decide to use and whether it is in legacy/RAID/AHCI mode.

Legacy/IDE - will install fine without
RAID/AHCI - will require drivers; via floppy or slipstreamed with nLite.

 

I was right then, I will need the drivers. Will the samsung SATA drivers come with the drive on a floppy? Or will I need to DL?

 

No drivers come with drives. You'll need to download them from samsung's site.

 

Drivers should come with the motherboard, not the drive.

 

So SATA drivers for all drives for XP Pro will come with my mobo?

 

Yes.

It's controller dependant, not device connected dependant for the drivers that XP will require.

And you don't need to slipstream, just press F6 when the first loading bar appears when you go to first install XP. Watch for the message. Then you just insert the floppy disk that you copied the drivers to from the CD that came with your motherboard when prompted.

 

Floppy disk? Who has those these days...

 

To clear up the confusion.The Hard drives themselves do not require a driver of any form, the motherboard controllers are what require drivers in some cases.As has been said, if you set the motherboard sata controller to legacy/native.ide or whatever the oprions are in your particular bios then you should not need any sata drivers. If you have the motherboard sata controller set to raid/ahciu or whatever your motherboards bios calls it then you will need the drivers.

Cheers

Z

 

Is there any way to avoid having to install drivers via floppy with the newer OSes such as Vista and Server 2008? As far as I know, nlite doesn't work with them, and there's no equivalent tool. Can the Windows installers load off USB drives?

 

Vista and 2008 support usb so you don't need floppys anymore to load raid drivers etc

 

I had the same issue.
I have an old XP Pro CD (no service pack) and Windows could not find my SATA drive.

XP with SP2 and XP with SP3 have a generic SATA driver already there. So, you're right. Slipstreaming the SP will (most likely) fix your problem.

There was also another issue. Windows did not see more than 130GB of my drive without SP2.

I never manually installed any drivers for the SATA controller.

 

I installed nlite'd xp sp3 on my p5n-d(brand new quad core setup) last week. It worked great. I installed it onto my sata drive, no problem.

 

Ok... i've had to do F6 installs for many machines.

For native SATA/AHCI you will need the motherboard drivers. These can usually be sourced from the mobo's manufacturers website. It has nothing to do with the HDDs! I get my nVidia drivers from the mobo manufacturer's website, but I get Intel driver's from either the manufacturer or from Intel's website. For ICHxx Intel drivers, look for Intel Storage Matrix drivers.

I don't do slip streaming, so I'll give you a run down on F6 installations.

XP: You'll need a floppy drive... its the only way unless you slip stream. Unzip the drivers onto a floppy drive, and during the initial installation of XP, the first time you see the blue screen, you'll see a label at the bottom like: "Press F6 for drivers..." or something close. Press F6. It'll go through all its other crap, but instead of going into EULA, it'll go into your driver installation. Now enter the floppy, and install both the RAID and SATA/AHCI drivers. You may have one, or both, depending on your controller. Once they've loaded up properly, take the floppy out, and continue with the installation. You'll be fine now... thats it

Vista/S2008: pretty much the same way, but you can unzip the drivers onto a USB key, as these OS's recognise USB drivers immediately - just use the correct drivers (i.e. not XP drivers). You don't need to press F6. You'll get to a screen a bit into the installation, where you get to choose your HDD/Partition. There should be a button to install additional drivers. Here is where you can scan, and let it show you what possible drivers to use. Just install, remove USB drive, and return to the main screen and continue installation.

On intel machines, I usually also install the Intel Matrix software, but haven't quite found a use for it, as now i'm using dedicated HDD controllers in my system.

Anyway, hope that helps... its really not that hard - google is your friend.

 

If your bios supports it then you simply switch the sata controller mode to native and you dont need sata controller drivers despite having a sata contyroller.This is how I install XP on my HP laptop and a few others that I have done lately

Cheers

Z

 

I had an issue with installing XP on a new Toshiba laptop recently.

I tried 2 different USB floppy drives and multiple drives, and setup refused to copy a file across. iStor.sys or something similar.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I ended up slipstreaming it with nLite (which is EXTREMELY easy I might add). Definitely worth doing to save yourself a lot of time.... and why not customise your XP installation while you're at it nLite is great!

 

I recall reading that native mode is related to IRQ assignments for the controllers. For older operating systems, you'll want it disabled; for 2k/xp onwards/linux, enabled. AFAIK this has no bearing on the above drivers required for the controller when running AHCI/RAID. You can experiment with existing IDE legacy setups by enabling/disabling in the BIOS, and then checking your IRQ assignments in device manager.

Your actual SATA controller will (or should) have have the options of IDE legacy, AHCI & RAID (if available) as configurable options, with the latter two requiring the above F6 or slipstream method for XP.

 

Ah the fun of controllers and the confusion they cause. Its not helped by every mobo manufacturer using slightly different names and descriptions in their BIOS entries

Native / legacy
controls how the drive is presented to the operating system. It's for backwards compatibility of old OS'es (Win9x).
Native or legacy does NOT require drivers in either mode.

IDE / AHCI / RAID
The mode in which the controller behaves. AHCI is required to enable things like NCQ and advanced power saving (IIRC per drive spindown instead of per-controller). RAID is what it suggests.

IDE: supported in the OS (NO extra drivers needed)
AHCI: requires extra drivers
RAID: requires extra drivers

 

Exactly the same here. Many new notebooks, notably Toshiba and ASUS,will require the drivers slipstreamed onto Cd before XP can be installed.

I also tried 2 different USB floppy drivers and neither would copy all the files across, getting stuck just as ECHO describes.

Use nlite to slipstream.

 

Installing XP PRO with SP3 onto Sata drives

With XP search Microsoft Tech Net AHCI support is covered there,there is actually a bit more to it than just F6 to fully enable it.
Slipstreaming is the preferred option as a reinstall if required then is no longer an issue.
Vista comes ex factory with AHCI support so make sure you set AHCI not IDE compatability in the BIOS for Vista.
As a side note if anyone wants to dual boot with Later Linux 26 series Kernel Distro's they wont even find a Drive unless AHCI is enabled in BIOS.
This means if you want to dual boot either Fix the XP issues (XP-PRO X64 as well) or go into the bios to reset Controllers for whatever OS you need to boot,What a pain.