Will SATA always be so complicated to install?

[Dennis Travis]

Gotham33, not sure about all USB Floppies, but my Teac USB Floppy is plug and play in Windows 2k, XP and Mac OSX. Under 98 I had to install a driver but with any modern OS or Motherboard yes, it just works. Most new Motherboard Bios's have a setting to boot from USB that I have seen.

 

[Goi]

Some motherboards make it harder. It took a few tries on my VNF3-250 board to get it right - the earlier BIOSes require that you enable SATA RAID and configure it even if you had no intention of running RAID - kinda counter intuitive. As others have mentioned, it's not as easy as installing an IDE drive.

 

[Xatrix]

Aren't floppy drives like $10 lol

 

[Robor]

Heh, I agree with the "old school" crowd. Hitting the "F6" key and providing a driver for a SATA controller isn't that big of a deal. I remember the days of doing the autoexec.bat and config.sys file edits as well. And the 2GB partition limit with FAT was fun. Heck, anyone who's upset with installing WinXP should try installing and supporting Windows 3.1 or WinNT Workstation. Now that was a PITA!

 

[episodic]

I took my SATA drive back and got a refund when I found you had to have a floppy drive. I did not have a floppy drive in the house. No friends I knew had one. Seriously, you should not have to hook up antique hardware to simply install a harddrive.

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: episodic
I took my SATA drive back and got a refund when I found you had to have a floppy drive. I did not have a floppy drive in the house. No friends I knew had one. Seriously, you should not have to hook up antique hardware to simply install a harddrive.

Kind of ironic what you wrote about floppies being antiques. I wholeheartedly agree as it seems the only time I am constrained to use one is with old systems. In all other cases, being on a network or using a CD or a thumbdrive does the job for me.

And yet as antique as they may be, they are required to install the latest generation of hard drives...

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: episodic
I took my SATA drive back and got a refund when I found you had to have a floppy drive. I did not have a floppy drive in the house. No friends I knew had one. Seriously, you should not have to hook up antique hardware to simply install a harddrive.

That doesn't make sense to me. Floppy drives cost about $20 and they come in handy for things like loading a controller driver or upgrading firmware that can't be done from within the OS. And it's not like there's anything that can be done about it without releasing a newer version of the OS that already has the controller drivers. If the OS doesn't have a driver for the controller it can't see the HD so you need to provide it. Kinda sucks that it can't be done via a CDROM though.

 

[Cerb]

The standard IDE implementations work with drivers on the Windows CD. Give SATA a few years, and it'll be all fine.

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: Cerb
The standard IDE implementations work with drivers on the Windows CD. Give SATA a few years, and it'll be all fine.

I'm curious, is there already an official, ratified, and adhered-to SATA implementation? Or is there a certain degree of variation?

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: TechnoPro

Originally posted by: Cerb
The standard IDE implementations work with drivers on the Windows CD. Give SATA a few years, and it'll be all fine.

I'm curious, is there already an official, ratified, and adhered-to SATA implementation? Or is there a certain degree of variation?

As far as controlling the chipset, I don't know. But there are very few that need worrying over, as far as how they do it, and also, the OS installation doesn't need it to be optomized for speed or features--it just needs to work.

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: Cerb

Originally posted by: TechnoPro

Originally posted by: Cerb
The standard IDE implementations work with drivers on the Windows CD. Give SATA a few years, and it'll be all fine.

I'm curious, is there already an official, ratified, and adhered-to SATA implementation? Or is there a certain degree of variation?

As far as controlling the chipset, I don't know. But there are very few that need worrying over, as far as how they do it, and also, the OS installation doesn't need it to be optomized for speed or features--it just needs to work.

Very true - point well taken.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's a good question - will a USB floppy work, for installing drivers during the "press F6" phase of an NT-based OS installation? Wouldn't the USB floppy drive itself need drivers at that point, or is the installer still in real-mode, and can make BIOS calls, and the BIOS emulates ordinary floppy BIOS calls and routes them to the USB floppy instead? And if so, then why can't you stick "press F6" drivers onto a USB flash drive and use that instead of a floppy? I haven't tried it, but I've heard many a time that you cannot, you have to have an actual floppy drive for NT to load the drivers off of. So what gives? What is the component that is holding us back from completely excising the entire ISA bus / floppy-controller / mechnical floppy-drive chain from our modern systems? (I would still keep a floppy installed, most likely, as I still use it occasionally.)

 

[imported_manchild]

We're all pretty competent here, but the amount of time spent discussing floppy drives that no one uses anymore could be spent figuring out how easy it is to slipstream a windows install with a service pack or drivers that eliminate the need to deal with floppies to install with SATA drives.

It's a no-brainer.

 

[CheetahMk2]

Don't Copy that Floppy!

I say we ban them. My motherboard is relatively recent and it doesn't support USB drive booting - kidna sad actually. Migration from ISA was forced, I say the same for floppies. If drivers cannot be loaded from a USB drive during an install I say update the XP installer. Maybe have another seperate CD to preload, then insert the old install CD... like a PS bootdisk. That's the logical (or nice) thing for MS to do.

No, I don't boot from a SATA device, but I did have to set it up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: CheetahMk2

Don't Copy that Floppy!

I say we ban them. My motherboard is relatively recent and it doesn't support USB drive booting - kidna sad actually. Migration from ISA was forced, I say the same for floppies. If drivers cannot be loaded from a USB drive during an install I say update the XP installer. Maybe have another seperate CD to preload, then insert the old install CD... like a PS bootdisk. That's the logical (or nice) thing for MS to do.

No, I don't boot from a SATA device, but I did have to set it up.

Well, that is kind of what they created "WinPE" for ("pre-installation environment"). It's a great idea, and I hope that it develops further. It would be nice, for say, a minimalist WinPE to boot up off of the CD, and then offer to allow loading of OEM drivers from any available medium, partition/format volume-management, recovery, or OS installation.

The other idea, is with Intel's EFI ("extensible firmware interface") spec, that device-drivers for whatever hardware we have attached to the system, are actually stored in the BIOS itself, and both the BIOS and the OS uses them. To update, we simply run some sort of driver-installer (how? I don't know - maybe WinPE? ), and it adds on a module to the EFI firmware, and then Windows' automatically recognizes it and uses it.

So theoretically, for OSes that support EFI, you might only have to load a driver for new storage (or other) hardware once, and every OS that you had loaded onto that system could use it from then on.

It kind of reminds me of old mainframe/minicomputers, really, with a "console machine", a teletype/DECwriter, combined with a with a floppy drive, used for loading things like microcode updates into the machine.

 

[Insane3D]

Lots of misinformation in this thread.

First, the "F6 procedure" is usually only needed when the SATA ports are controlled by a add-on chip, like the Silicon Image chips. These are basically the same as IDE/SATA cards, just integrated onto the board, and still on the PCI bus. Most of the boards that have the SATA ports controlled natively by the chipset can act like normal IDE ports during the windows install, unless you are setting windows on a RAID array.

SATA drivers can EASILY be slipstreamed onto a XP CD with almost no effort. It's simply a matter of cutting and pasting a couple of lines in a couple of setup files using notepad...not difficult at all.

Yeah, everyone keeps saying the floppy is obsolete. How can that be if its the goto guy for flashing bios and installing drivers?

It's not really. About the only drivers you'll need to load from a floppy these days is SATA/SCSI ones during a windows install, but as I said, it's EXTRMEMLY easy to slipstream these onto the OS CD. As for bios flashing, the "purists" still use it, but windows based flashers are extremely common nowadays, and all the bugs that early versions had have been worked out. Even if you still don't trust windows flashing, it takes all of about a minute to make a bootable DOS CD with the bios flasher and files on it.

IMO, there is no reason for a floppy nowadays...



Edit:

Here is the guide for slipstreaming SATA/RAID drivers onto your XP CD...

http://greenmachine.msfnhosting.com/READING/addraid.htm

The guide uses the SI drivers, but the procedure can be followed for any SATA/IDE/SCSI controller...

 

[Calin]

Originally posted by: footbal07
man we are spoiled theses days. honestly the hardest part i had installing sata drives was finding a floppy drive to use.

I couldn't agree more

 

[PumpActionWalrus]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: BW86

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Complicated?

If "insert disk, press F6" is too hard for someone to handle, they should be buying a Dell.

- M4H

seriously...how can it get any easier?

Well, it could just *work*, like most other peripherals. And it could not require a floppy drive for some arcane reason beyond all comprehension -- why can't it let you swap out the WinXP disk for a driver CD, and then switch back?

Not an issue with SATA, an issue with Microsoft

 

[SUOrangeman]

Anyone remember installing Office 95 from about 33 floppies?

BartPE, for those of us who don't have access to Windows PE: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

BTW, you'll still have to slipstream with BartPE, but at least you won't be forced to work with only a lone command-line environment.

Given that most everyone who is building a system from scratch has access to a working PC, I don't foresee the BIOS-imposed limitations ending anytime soon. Once a BIOS can control every device regardless of having "old technology" or new, we can finally enjoy a system build from scratch without any up-front planning.

-SUO

 

[CraigRT]

some SATA controllers have native support and don't even require driver disks.

for the differences between SATA and IDE, I'll stick with IDE for now, it's easy enough to not even have to push F6, and the fact IDE is less money. and lastly SATA offers pretty much 0 gains in anything.

 

[Tiamat]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Complicated?

If "insert disk, press F6" is too hard for someone to handle, they should be buying a Dell.

- M4H

For me its more of a PITA due to me not owning a floppy drive anymore. Once the floppy drive is installed, its cake walk tho.

 

[DyslexicHobo]

It was a real pain when I installed my SATA drive. Yeah yeah, I made the floppy, stuck it in during boot, pressed F6 what whatnot.

The drive wasn't being recognized like my other IDE drives were... After looking for a solution for a few days with no success, I just decided to buy a cheap 40 gig and install Windows on that, instead and use my 160 GB SATA as storage.

 

[Pythias]

Originally posted by: Insane3D
Lots of misinformation in this thread.

First, the "F6 procedure" is usually only needed when the SATA ports are controlled by a add-on chip, like the Silicon Image chips. These are basically the same as IDE/SATA cards, just integrated onto the board, and still on the PCI bus. Most of the boards that have the SATA ports controlled natively by the chipset can act like normal IDE ports during the windows install, unless you are setting windows on a RAID array.

SATA drivers can EASILY be slipstreamed onto a XP CD with almost no effort. It's simply a matter of cutting and pasting a couple of lines in a couple of setup files using notepad...not difficult at all.

Yeah, everyone keeps saying the floppy is obsolete. How can that be if its the goto guy for flashing bios and installing drivers?

It's not really. About the only drivers you'll need to load from a floppy these days is SATA/SCSI ones during a windows install, but as I said, it's EXTRMEMLY easy to slipstream these onto the OS CD. As for bios flashing, the "purists" still use it, but windows based flashers are extremely common nowadays, and all the bugs that early versions had have been worked out. Even if you still don't trust windows flashing, it takes all of about a minute to make a bootable DOS CD with the bios flasher and files on it.

IMO, there is no reason for a floppy nowadays...



Edit:

Here is the guide for slipstreaming SATA/RAID drivers onto your XP CD...

http://greenmachine.msfnhosting.com/READING/addraid.htm

The guide uses the SI drivers, but the procedure can be followed for any SATA/IDE/SCSI controller...

Excellent! I guess I'm a little behind the times. Thanks for deciding to educate and inform rather than screaming and attacking my character

 

[piasabird]

What is a floppy drive?

Seriously who on earth really needs a floppy drive?

Most of them are built so junky they arent worth buying.

I guess one could just write a script to run it all off the CD. Microsoft has some instructions for things like custom lists of hardware for automated installs for OEM's. But most people will not be bothered with that for one motherboard.

 

[Insane3D]

Originally posted by: Pythias

Originally posted by: Insane3D
Lots of misinformation in this thread.

First, the "F6 procedure" is usually only needed when the SATA ports are controlled by a add-on chip, like the Silicon Image chips. These are basically the same as IDE/SATA cards, just integrated onto the board, and still on the PCI bus. Most of the boards that have the SATA ports controlled natively by the chipset can act like normal IDE ports during the windows install, unless you are setting windows on a RAID array.

SATA drivers can EASILY be slipstreamed onto a XP CD with almost no effort. It's simply a matter of cutting and pasting a couple of lines in a couple of setup files using notepad...not difficult at all.

Yeah, everyone keeps saying the floppy is obsolete. How can that be if its the goto guy for flashing bios and installing drivers?

It's not really. About the only drivers you'll need to load from a floppy these days is SATA/SCSI ones during a windows install, but as I said, it's EXTRMEMLY easy to slipstream these onto the OS CD. As for bios flashing, the "purists" still use it, but windows based flashers are extremely common nowadays, and all the bugs that early versions had have been worked out. Even if you still don't trust windows flashing, it takes all of about a minute to make a bootable DOS CD with the bios flasher and files on it.

IMO, there is no reason for a floppy nowadays...



Edit:

Here is the guide for slipstreaming SATA/RAID drivers onto your XP CD...

http://greenmachine.msfnhosting.com/READING/addraid.htm

The guide uses the SI drivers, but the procedure can be followed for any SATA/IDE/SCSI controller...

Excellent! I guess I'm a little behind the times. Thanks for deciding to educate and inform rather than screaming and attacking my character

No problem...glad I could help. It's really quite an easy thing to do, and you really only have to do it once.