P4P800 and Serial ATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter Leigh-Anne \(LA\)
  • Start date Start date
L

Leigh-Anne \(LA\)

Hiya

I have a P4P800 and thinking of replacing my ATA drives with a single 250GB
Serial ATA drive.
I have all the cables (Data and PSU).

I am running WIN XP Pro SP1

Is there anything else I need to worry about, bios settings..

Do i need any other drivers.

Thx

Leigh-Anne
 
If the 250GB SATA drive will be your only drive and you'll be installing XP
on it you have a slight problem. XP doesn't know about SATA (no driver),
only SP1 has the SATA driver.
Sooo, you'll need to copy the SATA driver off of your motherboard's
installation CD onto a floppy, then when in the earliest stages of
installing XP onto the new harddrive, XP will ask you to insert the floppy
containing any 3RD PARTY DRIVERS. That's when you insert your pre-made
floppy.
Good luck.
 
I'm sure Dave's advice is correct. I'm not very expert. However, I have a
P4P800, and XP SP1, connected a 120 GB Matrox serial drive and it was
automatically recognized. I never needed the floppy. You have to initialize
and format the drive. If you don't how to do this perhaps someone else can
explain, since I have an Italian version of XP and my translations of the
utilities might be inaccurate.
One thing -- when the drive was completely empty, I transferred the contents
of a Iso cd -a game- and the drive became a cd player. In other words,
instead of appearing as a hard drive in system resource, it showed up as a
cd player, complete with autoplay in the menu. I removed the game but the
confused drive kept asking for "start.exe"; the executive file of this game.
Had a devil of a time turning it back into a normal hard drive. Perhaps this
is the normal behaviour of all hard drives.
 
The advice the other 2 gave you is correct. Download & install Service Pack
1 for WinXP if you haven't already. Then set it up in Bios and go for it.

By the way, are you the Leigh-Anne that used to log into
Freebird BBS back in the 80's? If you are, I was the sysop back then.

(e-mail address removed)
 
Hey LA,

I just jammed a P4P800 and a SATA drive together with XP SP1, just boot from
the XP SP1 CD, and do the install, XP is smarter than some give it credit
for. The drive will be recognized as normal and you will have to partition
it and format it before installing windows XP (all part of the setup).

You will not need any drivers or crap like that as the SATA is part of the
ICH5 and recognized similarly to the PATA ports are. Download the newest
Intel INF files and latest drivers for all you equipment and drop them on a
CD. Enjoy.
 
Or you can clone the PATA drive which has XP on it to your SATA drive - I
used Ghost 2003 to do mine. You can install the SATA driver via Device
Manager.

But a fresh install is usually the best option.
 
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