barrowhill said:
Peter,
Thanks for your quick response. Your points are noted. Having repacked PC
to take to my son, I can't review BIOS settings/options. This will have to
wait till weekend.
I'm a bit concerned with your last point.........quote......Be aware that
this repair
installation might ask for the SATA drivers for your mobo....and will only
look for them on a Floppy drive.
New PC wasn't supplied with floppy, though one could be installed. How come
repair install not looking for CD/DVD ??? Motherboard supplied with
drivers/Utilities on CD-ROM
I didn't find a match for the motherboard model number. Foxconn uses really
long part numbers, and has variants of the same board.
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/downloads.aspx
You state that the board has two P-ATA connectors. If the motherboard uses
ICH7 Southbridge, that has support for one P-ATA port. That could mean
the second port is supported by another chip (which could well need a driver
if used). It could mean that one IDE port needs a driver and the other one
does not. The physical placement of the connectors may hint at which is
which. To find out more, the motherboard manual (which you can download,
rather than unpacking the computer documentation) can be used to see what
hardware is listed. Whoever built your system, likely used the ICH7
connector for the DVD, for best compatibility. Sometimes, the alternate
chip doesn't "play nice" when asked to boot ATAPI (optical) devices.
ATA (hard drives) aren't as cranky.
Intel Southbridges do allow using a Microsoft driver for Southbridge ports.
Options that the Intel Southbridge might offer are (vanilla, AHCI, RAID),
where I don't remember what the ordinary option is called. AHCI and RAID
require drivers (F6 and the floppy). If you have WinXP SP1 or later
Windows installer CD, there should be a driver that can work with a
PCI mapped port, which is what native mode on the Intel Southbridge
looks like.
If you look at this document, page 11, newer storage devices are PCI
mapped. And I believe the driver in SP1 supports that. The Legacy
option is the way motherboards used to be made - with exactly two
IDE connectors and up to four disks - it is I/O space mapped, uses IRQ14
and IRQ15, and older operating systems understand that mode out of the
box. The native mode would not be understood by an older OS, but native
mode supports more drives total. If selecting AHCI or RAID, those are
things that WinXP would not have drivers for, and you'd need the
driver floppy for them. (Before dismissing the RAID option, if there
is any kind of a future plan to use RAID, then a RAID driver can be
installed with just the one disk present. The Intel RAID software
allows migration to RAID configurations at a later date, as long
as the original disk had the RAID driver, and the BIOS was set
for RAID. If selecting to go "vanilla" at this time, that makes
RAID migration a lot tougher in the future.)
(Some background on SATA on the Intel Southbridge)
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/manuals/252671.htm
"RAID ready" is mentioned here, but without further elaboration
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-015988.htm
"What is a "RAID Ready" system?"
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-021702.htm
For floppy diskettes, when you look at the motherboard CD, there
will be something like a "makedisk" utility on the CD. When you
run that, it prompts for a blank floppy, you insert the floppy and
it makes a driver floppy for you, complete with txtsetup.oem at
the top level. That is what you'd offer if drivers were necessary.
I suspect you'll be able to get by without it, perhaps without
even needing to modify the default BIOS settings. But the only
way to be sure, would be to get the exact motherboard model number.
So, yes, there is some trivia involved
And motherboard
manuals usually do a poor job of explaining the options.
If I were going on a road trip, I would steal the floppy drive
and cable from my own computer, and pack it in my luggage, plus
a few blank floppies. Actually, I wouldn't try to do anything
to a guest computer, unless a second perfectly working computer with
Internet access was present, but that is another story. I'd
want to be prepared for anything, because driving back and forth,
sucks
Paul
