Installing XP on a SATA Drive

[titanmiller]

Shortly I will be building myself a new Athlon64 system, I have been planning on using a SATA drive but I have read numerous reports of difficulties when Installing XP on a SATA drive due to the lack of native driver support. I have read about pressing F6 during the install and creating a floppy with the drivers on it but this is where I need some help.
Where would I get the driver? I have looked on different (motherboard) manufacturers' sites for drivers but as far as I can tell they are all .exe files (and over 1.44mb).
Also, would a USB floppy drive be recognized before/during a windows install (I know that USB keyboards/mice are) - I wasn't planning on putting a internal FDD in this computer.

Thanks for the help, I just want my build to go as smoothly as possible and with no surprises.

 

[mechBgon]

What motherboard are we talking, if you've picked one out yet? Why do you want SATA, btw?

 

[titanmiller]

I put the Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro into my shopping cart as a "place holder" so I could evaluate the total cost, this could very well change once I do more research on what mobo I want.
I chose SATA mainly because of the slimmer cable, but after learning about the troubles I think might just settle for a standard ATA drive.

 

[Ken90630]

This is coming from someone who's very much an admitted non-expert when it comes to motherboards, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere here on Anandtech recently that the SATA drivers for XP should come with the motherboard (presumably on a CD-ROM?) if the board has native SATA support. There was a thread with VERY specific info on this about, oh, I'd say a month & a half ago or so, but it's probably fallen off the shelf by now.

But wait for Tom's (mechBgon) reply -- he knows more about this stuff than I ever will. I'm interested to read his reply too, 'cuz I have a Raptor sitting in its box waiting for me to get around to the second build I have planned. And I may go Athlon 64 for it like you.

 

[mechBgon]

I did a quick skim of the Gigabyte's owners' manual. They stop short of telling you where you get the necessary drivers and how to make the floppies you'll need, or maybe there's a supplemental manual I don't have. I'm going to speculate that their support CD has a utility that will make a driver floppy for you (on a working computer that has Windows installed already). That's how the Asus boards are coming now, anyway. As for it letting you use a USB drive as a floppy drive, I don't know whether that will work or not, but the worst-case scenario is that you cable up a floppy for the first stage of Setup.

Bigger picture: I'm pretty turned-off by the Gigabyte 8KNS Pro because instead of using the chipset's native features, they've jammed a bunch of PCI-based controllers onto it. PCI-based IDE RAID, PCI-based SATA RAID, PCI-based gigabit Ethernet, PCI-based Firewire... no, thank you!

 

[Axon]

SATA installation is a major, major pain. On a good motherboard, you will need a floppy to install the controller if you're planning on using SATA as your boot drive. Windows will always prompt you to insert the controller into drive A:.

On a bad motherboard, Windows won't find the drive randomly during installation, will crash on you for no reason, and will give you all sorts of issues. For example, my MSI Neo-FISR board decided to start reporting that the SATA HD it was booting from was full. A 200 gig WD Sata HDD. All I had put on it was Winows XP and AIM and it was reporting that the drive was full.

The machine would also crash randomly during attempts to install other programs, while downloading, or any other time it felt like crashing for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Inititialy thinking it to be the Hard Drive, I tried the SATA Hard Drive in another machine for a week and it was flawless. Tried it on the MSI board again and it kept going nuts on me.

SATA (with the same WD hd) was fine on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, but God, the MSI Neo-FISR SATA controller is the worst thing I've ever seen. Now, to be fair, it could just be this particular motherboard. But there are a lot of reports of similar troubles on the MSI forums, and I'm really starting to believe their SATA software is the culprit.

I'm thinkning of going ATA again myself - anyone know of a good, quiet ATA HD? My SATA is whisper quiet, I'd hate to give her up....

 

[Agamar]

My motherboard didn't even need the SATA drivers when I installed my Raptor.

 

[Ken90630]

Hi, Titan,

If it were me, I'd probably just pick up the phone & call the mobo mfgr and also the HD mfgr and ask them what you're gonna need to do. You could probably knock out both calls in 10 minutes or so. Would probably be quicker & easier than trying to figure it out ahead of time just based on what they have on their Web sites.

There are a ton of people using Raptors (and other SATA drives), so this can't be an overwhelmingly difficult problem. My guess is that the newer the board, the more likely you are to get the drivers on an included CD-ROM or floppy (or at least be told how to get them easily).

Hope this helps.

 

[nolovenohope]

Originally posted by: Agamar
My motherboard didn't even need the SATA drivers when I installed my Raptor.

Same here, and I have a Shuttle SB61G2 (I think that model # is correct).

 

[e38826]

The SATA DRIVERS ARE ON THE MB CD IN THE BOOTDISK FOLDER. I THINK THE FILE NAME IS NVSATA. ANYWAY EXTRACT IT AND MAKE A FLOPPY WITH IT AND YOU ARE GOOD TO GO. CRANK DOWN YOUR SPEED ON YOUR COMPUTER OR YOU WILL HAVE A BAD LOAD WITH MISSING DRIVERS, ETC. IT TOOK ME 5 LOADS TO FIGURE OUT THAT SLOWING DOWN THE COMPUTER WAS THE BEST TO INSURE THAT IT TOOK ALL DRIVERS. THE DRIVERS ON THE CD ARE NOT THAT GOOD THOUGH. I NOW USE A WD 200GIG ATA100 AS MY MAIN DRIVE AND STORE LARGE FILES AND THE CACHE ON THE SATA WHICH IS REALLY FAST FOR NOT BEING RAID.

 

[mitchauer]

Explore the Gigabyte CD and look for a folder called "Other" in that folder there are 2 folder with an SiI xxxx number, the 2nd folder with that name are the drivers you need to put on a floppy. HUADRV.DLL, INSTALL.EXE, KEY.INI,README.TXT, etc. These files will fit on a floppy easily.

 

[T8000]

Most SATA capable mainboards ship with a Windows driver floppy in the retail package. And if you do not have a floppy drive yourself, you can use any computer with a floppy drive and a CD-RW to create a CD that emulates a bootable floppy using Nero. However, this only works if you have two CD drives during install, one for Windows and on for the floppy image. But it is a lot easier to use an internal floppy drive, even if you only attach it during install, and floppy drives are rather cheap these days.

Furthermore, when SATA is not recognized it will automatically shift to ATA-100 compatability mode. This works very well, but performance will be slightly lower untill the driver is installed in Windows. I could even install Windows 98SE on my 160GB SATA disk without a SATA driver (I use Windows 98SE as second option for dual boot, but it has to be installed before XP).

 

[BurningInferno]

I might have some usefull info about SATA...
I wanted to upgrade my 80gb Maxtor to 160gb and since I had a mobo with serial ata I thought it'd be a good idea to buy a SATA.
Here goes the pain...
My already installed windows XP on another hdd only needed drivers to see the SATA. BTW drivers were on the cd of my mobo.
When I tried to instal windows on the SATA problems started to appear one after another.
The only thing you need is the drivers in the cd, just this time in a floppy. Nothing difficult!! The controller was identified correctly, copy of files completed successfully and i restarted. Then when booting from SATA to continue the installation, a blue screen appeared telling me that files had bad crc checksums. Installation stopped and I couldn't continue at all!!
Windows 9x install excelent on SATA without even use of the drivers, neither during install nor after!
The problem seemed to be on the chipset of the mobo, Sil3112...
I noticed something else...
When I was running WinXP on the other hdd and had connected the SATA as a storage I run a couple of benchamrks. Sandra gave me a buffered read/write at about 80MB/sec!!! WTF? It's supposed to be over 100MB/sec... My older maxtor gave me 108MB/sec on the ata133 bus! Even my WD gave over 80MB/sec as an ata100!!

Where have I concluded?

• If you want to use Win9x on the SATA, no need to worry about drivers

• If you want to use WinXP on the SATA, find a mobo that has a SATA controler that is not passing through the PCI!! My mobo Gigabyte GA-7VAXPU that has the Sil3112 does that as the Sil3112 is a PCI controler... I propose Sil3114 which has command queueing and thus enhancing performance...

• Keep in mind that if you use a chipset like the Sil3112 you will have lower peak transfer rates than a native (is it called so?) SATA chipset.

Finally, I sold my SATA drive and bought a ATA133 maxtor running fine on my system, reaching 110MB/sec in buffered read according to Sandra.

PS: SATA generation 1 does NOT offer anything new appart from the new interface. If you really want to use SATA, wait until SATA2 which is going to have up to 300MB/sec peak tranfer rates!! Then, I guess, the hdd technology will be really better and faster than now.

 

[SilentSuicide]

Well for what its worth, you can see in my sig that im using a couple of SATA drives and i can honestly say that the install was pretty straight forward, i would even say easy.

What i did was make a 1.44mb floppy with the silicon 3112.r drivers on it (im using the current .47's), now you can get these drivers from the microsoft website as a manual download if you prefer, or you can try windows auto-update and get them that way, or you can try to navigate the silicon image web site and download them there (i dont recommend that web site because its real hard to navigate). Now when you copy the drivers to the floppy just remember to NOT include the GUI folder or the text file, that way the drivers should fit on the floppy. From there its just a matter of having the floppy in the drive when you install windows, do the F6 thingy and you'll be on your way.

Hey dont worry about it, i was a little gun-shy myself about all this SATA stuff, if an idiot like me can do it then you should have no problems, do your self a favor and grab that 74G Raptor (hell make that 2 of them and raid-0 them togeather) you wont be sorry with a Raptor, i know im not.

 

[coolred]

I have read most post in this thread, but skimmed others, didn't see this asked. I actually just bought a PATA drive and thats fine as long as I can make the cables lay in the case unobtrusively(SP?). If I can't I was considering a PATA to SATA adaptor. My question, can I install windows using the drive in PATA mode, then get the SATA drivers installed, then switch the hard drive over to SATA with the adaptor, and be all set?

 

[blakeatwork]

Originally posted by: coolred
I have read most post in this thread, but skimmed others, didn't see this asked. I actually just bought a PATA drive and thats fine as long as I can make the cables lay in the case unobtrusively(SP?). If I can't I was considering a PATA to SATA adaptor. My question, can I install windows using the drive in PATA mode, then get the SATA drivers installed, then switch the hard drive over to SATA with the adaptor, and be all set?

That I'm not sure on... but it doesn';t hurt to try... not like you can't just dio a reinstall..

on the original matter, I just recently mirrored a set of WD Raptors (36GB). I was required to install RAID drivers, but I had had them running prior to redoing my system, and didn't have to install any drivers... XP picked them up right away.

Installation was easy enough, and much quicker mind you... Other then the RAID drivers, which I expected, and had my floppy ready with, I had no issues, and have had no issues..

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: Axon
SATA installation is a major, major pain. On a good motherboard, you will need a floppy to install the controller if you're planning on using SATA as your boot drive. Windows will always prompt you to insert the controller into drive A:.

On a bad motherboard, Windows won't find the drive randomly during installation, will crash on you for no reason, and will give you all sorts of issues. For example, my MSI Neo-FISR board decided to start reporting that the SATA HD it was booting from was full. A 200 gig WD Sata HDD. All I had put on it was Winows XP and AIM and it was reporting that the drive was full.

The machine would also crash randomly during attempts to install other programs, while downloading, or any other time it felt like crashing for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Inititialy thinking it to be the Hard Drive, I tried the SATA Hard Drive in another machine for a week and it was flawless. Tried it on the MSI board again and it kept going nuts on me.

SATA (with the same WD hd) was fine on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, but God, the MSI Neo-FISR SATA controller is the worst thing I've ever seen. Now, to be fair, it could just be this particular motherboard. But there are a lot of reports of similar troubles on the MSI forums, and I'm really starting to believe their SATA software is the culprit.

I'm thinkning of going ATA again myself - anyone know of a good, quiet ATA HD? My SATA is whisper quiet, I'd hate to give her up....

Hmm, quite the opposite for me, I've had nothing but problems with SATA on my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard. In fact, I just placed an order for the MSI K8N NEO to replace the ASUS board. I've had the ASUS board since January and I can't tell you how many times I've had to reinstall Windoze because my RAID 0 keeps crashing on this system. I've rma'd both drives to eliminate the possibility of it being the drives and I've rma'd the memory. That leaves the motherboard/drivers or the cpu (which I doubt-perfectly stable running WinXP Pro on an IDE drive on this system since Jan).

 

[SilentSuicide]

Nforce 3 250 is the way to go!

 

[Zap]

Here's the concise edition:

If you have one SATA drive and hook up to the Southbridge controller, no F6 floppy setup needed.

If you have one SATA drive and hook up to a controller other than the Southbridge (PCI card, onboard Promise, onboard Silicon Image) you will need to have the drivers on a floppy disk in a drive and hit F6 on initial install.

If you plan on running RAID of any sort, regardless of which controller you hook up to, you will need to have the drivers on a floppy disk in a drive and hit F6 on initial install.

If the controller is on the motherboard, the driver CD should have the files needed, just copy to a floppy disk.

Good luck and happy computing.