Install XP on single sata drive.

[Bob Harris]

I installed XP on a Seagate 120 Gig SATA drive connected
to an ASUS P4S8X motherboard. The only three slightly
tricky things were (1) I first had to define a RAID array
containing a single disk. This was doen during the POST,
long before ever reading the XP CDROM. I found this a bit
strange, since I had always thought that RAID meant
striped or mirrored disks. But, a single disk can be its
own RAID array and that was required with my motherboard.
(2) Very early in the XP installation I had hit a key
(F6?) and provide a floppy with windows drivers for the
SATA controller. Unlike IDE, USB, firewire, etc XP does
not come with SATA drivers (nor RAID drivers, nor some
SCSI drivers). The SATA drivers had to be on a floppy,
not a CD. The readme.txt file that came with the drivers
as part of the ASUS download package explained this. (3)
the floppy could not just contain the drivers. That would
be too simple. It also needed o have a file
called "txtsetup.oem". That I obtained from the ASUS CD
that came with the motherboard.

The good news is that XP is working well with this disk,
and it is FAST!

 

[Pete Baker]

Hi Bob

Apart from the requirement to specify the SATA drivers, pressing F6 during
set-up, and ensuring that the floppy disk used is correctly created -
required with every SATA controller that is *not* fully integrated, it
should be noted that the main issue you've encountered has only been seen,
as far as I'm aware, with some Asus mainboards - again those with separate
SATA controllers *not* fully integrated. In some of these cases there was
no requirement to set up the RAID array but Asus insisted on using the SATA
RAID controller and not a non-RAID version even when one was available -
probably due to a system BIOS restriction.

As for your RAID array, I assume it's a striped array - RAID 0. In this
case you should maintain regular back-ups of important data as the
performance boost from RAID 0 comes at with an increased risk of data loss.

hope that helps
Pete
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