SATA and Windows XP Installation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Firejack
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Firejack

Hi.

I recently bought myself a brand spanking new Maxtor SATA HDD. I put it
into my system and booted from the Win XP CD. Only to find Win XP didn't
support my SATA controller. I rebooted and hit F6 and then I think it was
"s" to load a driver for my SATA controller during setup. Only to find you
could only load the driver from a Floppy disk...... I was kinda very
frustrated by this since I don't have a floppy drive in either of my
computers. I've never needed to use one for several years ever since I got a
CD burner.
So after borrowing a floppy drive from another computer I got Win XP
installed. Now as no doubt I'll be install Windows XP sometime soon when it
screws up once more. What is the easiest method to go about a clean install
of Win XP in the future? I was thinking of a boot CD with the driver on but
I'm not sure if this would work.

Suggestions please!

Thanks a lot,

Andrew.
 
So far as I know, a floppy drive is the only way to get a driver into
the Windows installation. You could install the bare Windows install
then image it using Ghost or DriveImage, then you'll never need to go
through that again.

~ Adrian ~
 
Adrian said:
So far as I know, a floppy drive is the only way to get a driver into
the Windows installation. You could install the bare Windows install
then image it using Ghost or DriveImage,
Click to expand...

or bootitng (.com). Then you get an imager, boot manager, and partition
manager for $30, which you send if you like it.
 
Unfortunately I am planning to get a new graphics card, motherboard and CPU
in the not too distant future. Plus I'm not really willing to for fork out
$30 on a program when a Floppy drive is only $10.
Thanks for the suggestions though guys.

I really do hate Windows. I never suffer these poor programing oversights
with Linux :( Why do Microsoft assume everyone has a floppy disk drive, when
I'm guessing a fair amount do without one these days? Oh well rant over.

Thanks everyone! I'll go rethink what I'm going to do here... looks like
I'll be buying a floppy drive though :(

Later.
 
If you're going to be replacing the mobo, you should get a diskette witht
the SATA drivers. Most boards I work with include those on floppy for
XP/2000.
 
Most recent motherboards allow you to boot using USB devices. You could get
a USB flash drive and use it to load the SATA drivers. The smaller sizes are
very reasonably priced and would come in handy later as a removable storage
device.
Ken'
 
Why on earth you don't have the option to load the driver off a CD
during
Windows setup I don't know.... Grrr @ Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Because I suspect at that point, it hasn't loaded the ATAPI/IDE driver
in order to "see" the CD-ROM drive. The point where you insert the
floppy is to early on in the install procedure, it's had little chance
to load any type of driver. No reason why it couldn't load that first
though...

~ Adrian ~
 
For what that USB floppy would cost you could buy a USB flash drive that
would hold about 64 Meg or the equivalent of 44 floppies.
Ken'
 
Ken' said:
For what that USB floppy would cost you could buy a USB flash drive that
would hold about 64 Meg or the equivalent of 44 floppies.
Click to expand...

Indeed....logic at work. :)
 
I like formatting floppies while eating cake.

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