Clean Install Onto Serial ATA Drive

[Steve]

Hi,

I am trying to do a clean install of XP onto a new
computer. There is one hard drive, a 120 Gig SATA
drive and I cannot get the XP install to even see it.

I booted and pressed F4 to go to RAID etc configuration
and formatted the drive from there. I then rebooted with
the WinXP Pro disk in the CD (with is the first boot
device) and got to the XP installer. It gave me the option
to press F6 it use other mass storage so I did and, after
a few mins, it said that it could not find any mass storage
and gave the option of continuing without it or loading
drivers. I chose to load drivers - I have them on the
CD which came with the motherboard.

The next message was telling me that it could not find
a floppy drive so could not load the drivers.

How do I install XP on a new system with only one HDD
and that HDD is a SATA one. It has two CDs now.

Steve

 

[Wild Dean]

If you copy the SATA driver to a floppy disk from the driver CD that shipped
with the Mainboard and when the XP setup prompts you, press F6 with the SATA
driver disk in A: and wait until the setup is complete. It will load the
driver at some point after trying all the standard drivers. BTW if you have
SP1 on XP, you may have enormous difficulties with NTFS data corruption on
shutdown. I had that problem with XP SP1 on SATA and couldnt get rid of it!!
Ended up ditching the SATA drive for a regular IDE and going back to Win2K.

 

[Steve]

Bugger twice over. I do not have a floppy drive on the machine
and I have XPSP1 and do not what to ditch my SATA drive or
to go back to Win2K - fortunately I have a copy of Win2K if I
need to use it and I understand my XP license allows me to do
this.

Why would they not allow the drivers to be installed from my
flash drive or my other CD drive? Guess that will be in the upgrade
when enough people say "but we don't have a floppy drive".

Steve

Wild Dean wrote