S ATA Hard drive & XP

[mapleleaf]

I have started to build a new PC for home and thought I'd buy a large hard drive - ended up buying a 250 GIG one - then realised it was a serial ATA that needed a pci card. I bought one & as a secondary drive it works fine s long as I have an IDE drive as drive 0 off the motherboard.

I installed win xp pro on the ide drive which is designated drive c but it was an old one of "only" 2.5 gig and the win XP install basically filled it up.

So I disconnected the ide drive, booted from CD and tried to install win xp pro from CD . But it said it couldnt find any hard drives although the bios recognises the existance of the SATA drive. It did ask if I wanted to install 3rd party scsi drivers, I said yes and it insisted on the info being acessed only from floppy A . I put the motherboard drivers CD in (the CD drive ! ) but windows setup wouldnt look at it.

My basic question is this: Can I have just a SATA drive or do I have to have a normal IDE as drive C .

I didnt really want to buy another 20gig or so system drive . I'd much prefer to use the 250gig partitioned into say C: (system & programs 50gb) D: 190 gb data and E: 10gb for a ghost image of system files (Norton Ghost)

yours truly
confused from Manchester

 

[andy_k]

If you can't find a "fix" I've got an 8 gigabyte Maxtor drive just lying around that you are more than welcome to - that will swallow an XP install.

Andy

 

[fuzzer]

Ive got my new pc running a sata drive on xp pro and it installed fine ...

having said that , ive got sata on board.

 

[Flyer]

My basic question is this: Can I have just a SATA drive or do I have to have a normal IDE as drive C .

Dear Confused

Yes, you can have just a SATA drive. My current motherboard has on-board SATA (Abit NF7-S) and came with the drivers on floppy disk.

Couldn't you just copy the XP drivers onto a floppy and use that?

 

[scotth_uk]

Had the same issue building a shuttle xpc for a mate recently, just grab the drivers off the floppy during setup and it should be just fine.

 

[mapleleaf]

Thanks for the swift responce chaps

Cheers for the kind offer of the drive Andy . Your on the back burner

Andrew - I'm not quite sure which are the SATA drivers that I need to copy from the XP disc to a floppy - what am I looking for? Its a MAxstore 7Y250MO drive

Beacuse I am using a Geovison card I was advised that VIA chip sets can cause problems and it seems the motherboards the local dealer had (gigabyte) with SATA on board were Via chipsets. hence the non Via motherboard & no on board SATA

Problem seems to be that the drivers I need are on CD rather than floppy. Once I can identify the ones I need I should be ok by the sound of things

 

[andy_k]

seems like you are not the only one

http://forums.devhardware.com/archive/t-19339

http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/pid/751/qid/846351

and hundreds of other threads across the internet

one interesting comment is that you need to have SP1 for XP to get it to work properly with SATA, now that may be interesting if you have XP and the Service pack seperately, you may need to streamline them on a seperate machine or buy a newer copy of XP Pro with SP1 already included.


HTH

Andy

 

[mapleleaf]

Thanks,

thats weird as I have an original MS XP pro with SP1 CD .

do you know how I identify the drivers to pop onto a floppy?

Actually, I think this may be the key from the above thread link

"You have a seperate BIOS for the SATA controller, my guess is your hard drive wasn't slaved correctly, or you didn't have the SATA BIOS detect/set mode for the drive. "

I'll try & change a bios setting

 

[andy_k]

sent you a PM

 

[Big Ed]

Steve,

what brand of SATA card (not trying to teach you to suck eggs, but it's drivers for the card you need, rather than your Maxtor disk) did you buy? Best bet is just download the XP drivers from the manufacturers web site, rather than dig through the CD to find the correct files. Should work fine after this (same method as NT, etc have always used for RAID cards, so is well proven)

 

[mapleleaf]

The card is an Innovision Extrme IO card -
EIO 2 Channels Serial ATA PCI Controller Card DM-8301 (non Raid)

Value brand from DABS & has its own drivers but i havent used them because the card does work with the XP drivers cos I tried it & the drive in another PC that already had XP installed .

I think my course of action now is :

change Bios settings
try & setup XP again
If I am stil asked for drivers pop in the floppy and take it from there.

cheers to all

I'll let you know how I get on

PS
Another thing I've noticed is that my bios and WInXP seem to think the SATA is a scsci device - so whats the difference ?

 

[Big Ed]

Good luck - would imagine you will need the drivers, even if the native XP ones do work, since for whatever reason Windows likes to have the drivers up front for a different boot controller (is the same on the highpoint IDE RAID card I've got).

Think the BIOS calls the drive a SCSI device due to it being on an external disk controller, which by default used to mean a SCSI controller. Guess that a lot of interface cards default to presenting their devices to the system as SCSI - probably makes it easier to pass around the I/O requests using the SCSI command set.

p.s. for those not fluent in Geek, SCSI stands for Small Computer Systems Interface, which is basically a different disk interface, which is faster at sustained data throughput and seek times, as well as tending to have the faster RPM drives. Downside is it costs a LOT more than a normal ATA type disk does....

 

[mapleleaf]

success !

I copied the drivers from the CD supplied with the pci card to a floppy , changed the bios to ignore the first IDE connection in favour of the new pci drive card
I also tried teh maxstor drivers but they didnt work.

thanks to all lfor help & advice.

 

[adam1]

I know i'm late on the scene but having used PCI cards like promise ata100 and frastrack 100, including raid cards you always need to set up the boot device as the one you want to access in ur setup Bios.

That way you can use SATA and normal ide each time.

I would dual, or multiple boot with dif partitions and have sev Ops on one machine.