XP on SATA Drive HELP!

hey people complete SATA n00b here, just built a c2d machine for my cusin with a MSI 965 Neo Mobo and a 320gb SATA drive, now i cannot for the love of god get xp on the sata drive, it doesn't find the disk! i tryed the whole f6 thing but am kind of clueless, can anyone please explain step by step what i need to do for the drive to be detected (he has no floppy drive!) thanks

 

So you've tried installing xp ?

Some sata controllers need third party drivers to be install at the start of the xp install, this will require - floppy. (might be able to use something else i'm not sure).

EDIT, sorry just reread your post, maybe go into bios and see if the hdd is recognized and that it's set as bootable.

 

You will need a floppy drive to load the sata drivers during the boot process

Cheers

Z

 

Seems odd. Double check nothing is out of place in the BIOS.

However, I seem to remember that if the computer boots off the XP cd (ie set the CDROM/DVD drive as first boot) that it will load a heap of drivers, USB, SCSI etc, I'm reasonably sure it loads SATA drivers too, though i could of course be very wrong, but worth a try, unless of course thats what u are doing, in which case... make sure the HDD is spinning up when u turn the puta on (ie stuff is connected proper-like)

 

Had this problem myself..

You need to download your sata drivers, then streamline them into your windows installation disc if you don't have the floppy drive. I didn't have the floppy drive, I spent at least 12 hours looking for a solution that worked (other than buying a floppy drive).

You can download a program call "nLite" which lets you streamline any additional drivers into your windows installation cd, allowing you to load the correct sata drivers to load up when installing xp. Download here: nLiteOS

 

just install xp on a old ide drive grab your sata driver files and place them in ur c:\windows\sys32 directory

and boot up into dos and use a ghost8 floppy disk OR USB PEN,, and ghost disk to disk over to your new sata drive

unplug your old ide drive put it in a draw for next timeu may need to reinstall.only takes 5 min to ghost xp partition from new install... And your in

thats if youunderstand any of this wich being in the Newbie lounge you probably wouldnt..

 

streamline into a windows instalation disk..M8 its noobie lounge
i thought my thoughts on how to doit was gunna be tuff hehe

 

yes you do xp dosnt ask for anything but....
How good is Vista then when i installed my wifes Pc you could filter through attached hdrives or usb pens for your sata drivers....

 

Yeah I know but, that program makes it so simple. Compared to all of ther other non working over the top complicated options I came across, that option took me about 5 minutes. If I had of found that before 12 hours earlier, i might of actually headed out of the house on Saturday. It was a nightmare up until then.

Honestly, its so simple. I done it on a slow and old laptop, made my new windows cd...and wah-lah..all done.

 

yeah pretty much all retail xp cd's dont have SATA drivers on them. thats why you need to slipstream (integrate the sata drivers) into the install cd and burn that. or use the good ol' floppy which serves really no other purpose these days.

maybe u might have to go dig up an old FDD and go that way.

i just built my conroe rig today and to get the sata drive working i had to put the motherboard cd into another computer, run a program which puts the drivers onto a floppy, then when xp install asks if u want to install a THIRD PARTY SCSI DRIVER, HIT F6. keep hitting F6.
this is right near the beginning just after the blue screen comes on...

edit: where in sydney are u? i could prolly drop over sometime if u still cant figure it out. im not really free much so the times i am free might not be convenient.

-julz

 

Yeah I ended up buying a FDD after everything was going..just so much hassle. Guess they're good for something. I forgot to get some floppy disks at the computer shop though..it was nigh on impossible to find them anywhere. You'd think I was asking for a spare kidney.

 

Just to clear things up, if you are not running a RAID array you DO NOT need to load any drivers for the SATA hard drive, all newer Intel chipset boards (and NForce) have native SATA controllers.

Before trying to install XP, go into the motherboard BIOS and check that the hard drive is listed and that it's running in IDE mode.
Also check that your CD/DVD drive is set as first boot device.
Then reboot from the XP CD and make sure you choose to format the hard drive before trying to install.
Might also be worth checking the RAM, if you have more than one stick installed, take one of the sticks out and try installing XP with only one stick of RAM.

 

really? i had to install drivers for mine and its an ICH8R based chipset..
or was that because i used AHCI?

-j

 

A seperate SATA driver has not been needed since at least the Intel 865 chipset, therefore no need to do the old F6 install routine unless you want a RAID setup, in which case you need to install an additional RAID driver.

As for using AHCI mode, all ICH-8 chipsets have full AHCI support but it's Windows XP that has limited support for AHCI, therfore you need to install the additional driver for AHCI during installation of XP from a floppy using the F6 routine.
But if you are going to use the regular SATA IDE mode in the BIOS then no additional driver is needed during install.
Windows Vista on the other hand now has all the inbuilt drivers needed for AHCI, so no additional driver needs to be loaded during installation.

Additional info........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

 

yer i made a slipstream cd up for my Asus A8v delux mboards..it was easy but i had to do a bit of reading up on the how to's

 

thanks very much Darko, helped to better my understanding of it
iirc, back in the athlon 64 days, i had to use the F6 aswell. but that may have been because it was a VIA chipset or the chipset had RAID capabilities.

-j

 

You're welcome, there always seems to be some confusion and misinformation concerning SATA drives when in fact they are much simpler and easier to install than IDE drives.