Clean Install on SATA w/ IDE drives present

[LB]

Hi,

I have just finished building my new machine on a GA-
8KNXP with 2 EIDE and a SATA hard drive. I'm not doing
any RAID just need the room. I want the SATA drive to be
my system drive (SPEED) but I'm not able to install XP
Pro on it even though windows see it in the text install
phase. It installs on the primary master no matter what I
do. If anybody has some advice, I would appreciate.

One more thing: I do not have a floppy in this machine
anymore! I don't use them anymore so I don't want it to
sit there.

 

[Shenan T. Stanley]

I have just finished building my new machine on a GA-
8KNXP with 2 EIDE and a SATA hard drive. I'm not doing
any RAID just need the room. I want the SATA drive to be
my system drive (SPEED) but I'm not able to install XP
Pro on it even though windows see it in the text install
phase. It installs on the primary master no matter what I
do. If anybody has some advice, I would appreciate.

One more thing: I do not have a floppy in this machine
anymore! I don't use them anymore so I don't want it to
sit there.

My first response would be one of these two answers:

Without a floppy drive, you may be out of luck. Windows XP, although it
touts its good points, its setup is not made for floppy-less quite yet...
UNLESS

You could create your own Windows XP CD with the appropriate OEM drivers on
it - so Windows SHOULD be able to detect and install without your pressing
of F6.. In Theory.
http://unattended.msfn.org/xp/drivers.htm

Good Luck. The easy solution is to throw a FDD in there for the duration of
the install.

 

[mjb]

You dont need a floppy to install XP, it uses a bootable CD to do the job.
I have XP running off an SATA drive and have an EIDE on the system also. I
had to go into the BIOS and set the SATA drive as the boot disk. My BIOS
has asetting for boot order which at first didnt show the SATA, I had to dig
a little deeper and found a setting that let me pick which harddrive would
be used to boot.