SATA and XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter John M
  • Start date Start date
J

John M

I am attempting to install Windows XP Pro on my new
computer. After it says "press enter to enter setup" it
goes to a screen that says Windows did not detect a hard
disk to install to.

I already have two Serial ATA Hard Drives in the
computer, do I need to an IDE drive to install windows to?


Thanks John
 
The BIOS must support whichever disk you will boot to, if
the ATA port is on the mobo, see if it can be the primary
boot disk. If it is supported by a PCI add-in card, yes, I
think you'll need 1 IDE disk.


| I am attempting to install Windows XP Pro on my new
| computer. After it says "press enter to enter setup" it
| goes to a screen that says Windows did not detect a hard
| disk to install to.
|
| I already have two Serial ATA Hard Drives in the
| computer, do I need to an IDE drive to install windows to?
|
|
| Thanks John
 
John M said:
I am attempting to install Windows XP Pro on my new
computer. After it says "press enter to enter setup" it
goes to a screen that says Windows did not detect a hard
disk to install to.

I already have two Serial ATA Hard Drives in the
computer, do I need to an IDE drive to install windows to?
Click to expand...

Hi John,

Do you have the two discs configured as a RAID array? Or maybe the Serial
ATA controller is not integrated into your motherboard chipset, but is a
separate chip?
In either case, you'll need to provide a driver on a floppy disk at boot.
This is because Windows XP only sees by default drives that are presented by
the BIOS as being on a standard ATA controller (S-ATA or ATA/100), and S-ATA
RAID arrays (e.g Intel 865, 875 chipset) or discrete S-ATA controllers (e.g
Promise) do not do this.
To install the driver, press F6 as soon as XP Setup starts (you'll briefly
see a message at the bottom of the blue screen, saying "Press F6 to install
additional mass storage devices" or similar). When prompted, insert the
floppy disk containing the driver, which will either have been included with
your motherboard/S-ATA controller, or else can be downloaded from the
manufacturer's website.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks for your help.

the S-ATA is built-in to the motherboard. I did the
commands you suggested and it took me to the "mass
storage driver" screen. It said, insert disk into A: and
hit enter. when i hit enter, it loaded and then showed
the same screen again...i'm not sure if something is
wrong with the floppy drive or what...
 
It's probably not your floppy. I had very similar problems last week. The
easy fix is to install a conventional ATA drive and use that as your C
drive. Your SATA drive will be recognized once you get all the drivers
loaded. I tried the same thing with putting the SATA drivers on a floppy,
and XP setup loaded them after I pressed F6, but it still didn't "see" the
SATA drive, so I just put in the other drive and went from there. That's not
satisfactory, but it works for now. I'm sure that after SATA has been around
a bit longer, this will get fixed. Meanwhile, if you do a search on "SATA"
in this newsgroup, you'll see a lot of similar problems being reported.

Alan
 
That IS a fix, but it's a bit of a kludge and really shouldn't be necessary.
Serial-ATA has been designed to be compatible with legacy ATA at a low
level - if the BIOS declares the drives correctly then one should be able to
use any OS on S-ATA - even Windows 3.1 / DOS, just as though it's a standard
ATA/100 drive. I myself have installed XP on systems with only a S-ATA drive
several times, with no problems.
I suspect that in both your cases the driver floppy might not have been
correctly prepared - I believe I'm correct in saying that in order for XP
Setup to use the driver, the floppy must contain a TXTSETUP.OEM file which
is what XP Setup looks for when trying to load the driver. If all goes well,
then after pressing F6 and being prompted to insert the driver into A:,
Setup should display a list of the drivers found on the floppy (e.g
"Intel(R) 82801ER SATA RAID Controller", according to the sample floppy I've
just tried here).

Another possibility, of course, is that the BIOS is not configured correctly
for the drive. What motherboard do (either of) you have?
 
I've got an MSI K6-Delta LSR, with an Athlon XP 2500+. I tried the procedure
that you describe, with a floppy that had txtsetup.oem and the SATA/XP
folder, with all its contents on a floppy that I inserted when XP setup said
to press F6. It read the floppy and then asked if there were any other
drivers. These were Via drivers that I used; it's a Via chipset. Perhaps
there was a second set of drivers that I was supposed to use, I don't know.
Anyway, later in the install, it still said that it couldn't find any hard
drive. After I set up XP on the ATA hard drive, the SATA drive was visible,
so I'm using it as the D drive. I would like to make it the C drive, since
it is noticeably faster than a regular ATA drive. Key point is that Setup
did read the floppy and display the drivers it found, but that did not
result in the drive becoming visible. If you know how to make it work, I
might be willing to reinstall XP on the SATA drive, so I'm all ears on that.

Alan
 
Windows XP can only boot from controllers it knows about
and has drivers for. For unknown controllers you need to
install the drivers.

Your motherboard manual will explain all this, but when
trying to install XP fromthe CD, a message appears for a
short period of time at the beginner saying "Press F6 to
install third party controllers" or something similar.

You will need a FLOPPY disk with the drivers on it to do
this. later Windows XP will ask for the driver disk.

Again your motherboard manual should have all the
instructions. RTFM.

Dave
 
Hi ya!!!

I have the exact same problem!!! Bought a ASRock mobo with a P4 2.8
GHz, 512 RAM of 400MHz, and acouple of things including a 80gb S-ATA
HDD.

One of you fellows wrote that XP installationprogram will ask for the
floppy that i flashed with the drivers to the S-ATA, made by ASRock.
Well, I can install them with hitting "F6" in the beginning of the
installation process. And I also can see the HDD, and choose to install
XP there. BUT!!! After a while, Inst. program claims that he can't find
the file with a filename viasraid, ore somthing, well it is three files
with the same name, but different endings. Exactly these is on the
flash-disk!!! BUT!!! XP doesn't ask for any URL to them, like A:\ or
something. Do I have to use a pirate XP-CD, and burn the missing files
to the CD???

Thank you so much!!!
/Christoffer


Typheer
 
I am having basically the same thing, but all my hard drives are showing in device manager I have a MSI 865PE Neo2 series and i just installed a new Maxtor 120GB SATA HD, but when I try to install the appropriate SATA Driver Windows XP Pro installs it but give me a error code, device not loading

Do I have to reinstall Windows XP Pro?
 
I had a problem simular to this...except I was trying to use SATA drive as storage. After using the software that came with it to format it I went back into my bios to look at all my options, chose port 0 and rebooted. was only showing my drive as 31.4 gb. So I went through these steps a few more time trying to get the seagate software to recognize the correct size. Eventually this worked, and to the best of my knowledge, All was well. I even used the drive for about 4 hours. Next day when I start my comp. Drive literally disappears from My computer. contacted seagate tech support...complete waste of time. I was getting a error message in the task bar "windows delayed write" or something to that effect. Seagate tech support said no drivers were needed for this device. Anyway, what I had to do to get it to work was disconnect both my IDE drives and set SATA drive up as primary master. now it works fine, I havn't reinstalled my other drives yet,I'm only putting one back in, which I'll set as slave on the jumper. All in all, if I would have know it was going to be such a pain in the ass, I would have just bought another IDE hard drive, in spite of what people say about how much faster these are, it's really not true. even manufacturer will tell you the performance difference is negligble. And with a p4 2.8 a gig of ram and a geforce 5900 ultra I haven't found anything I can't max out and. so what little this hard drive will do won't even be noticeable. I'd say just go with IDE. I'm sure many will disagree.that's what makes the world go round.
 
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