SATA Drivers

[Jake]

I want to duel boot XP with a machine I bought with Vista pre installed. I
understand that I will need drivers for XP for the SATA drive. Will XP
prompt me for the drivers when I install?

 

[sgopus]

hit F6 when prompted and later in the install it will ask for the drivers,
and it will only look at your floppy drive, nowhere else.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You shouldn't need to provide drivers. They are surely in firmware on your
new computer as they have been for a couple of years on all new machines. I
seriously doubt that you will need to do an F6 or anything else.

Warning. You are installing an OS that does not know anything about Vista.
You will not have a dual boot menu like you would if you installed XP first
and then Vista. Do not proceed unless you know what you are doing. It is
certainly possible to repair this after the fact but be aware that you will
have to do this. You may be able to do it with VistaBoot Pro 3.3 (it
installs and runs on XP fine as well as Vista).

Also, be aware that dual booting XP and Vista does bad bad things to your
Vista recovery options such as system restore, shadow copies, and backup
files.

Have you considered running XP in a virtual machine on Vista using Virtual
PC 2007, VMWare, or Parallels instead?

 

[Jake]

hit F6 when prompted and later in the install it will ask for the drivers,
and it will only look at your floppy drive, nowhere else.

Thanks. I have no floppy, though I could slap one in from another machine.
Can I slipstream the drivers onto a cd?

 

[Jake]

Thanks Colin.
This will be my first time attempting this. I am using the tutorial I found
here. http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp
My system is new so if I make a mistake, I wont have anything to loose
except my time.
I will look into your suggestion of using Virtual Pc etc. before I commit to
anything. It may be what I'm looking for.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The advantage in using a virtual machine is that you can Vista and XP at the
same time and no reboots are needed. Nothing that is happening in the
virtual machine impacts Vista or your files. Unless you play 3D games that
only work on XP I highly recommend a virtualization solution.

Since VPC is free for the download, take a look:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I want to duel boot XP with a machine I bought with Vista pre installed. I
understand that I will need drivers for XP for the SATA drive. Will XP
prompt me for the drivers when I install?

You may or may not need SATA drivers, it depends on the disk controller on
the motherboard. My systems do not need extra SATA drivers, but some do.

AFAIK, if you need SATA drivers, you have to provide them on floppy, and a
USB floppy disk is a useful tool.

You'll know quite soon if you need the drivers, because the hard disk won't
be detected. If it is detected, you don't need them and can proceed.

HTH
-pk

 

[Bill in Co.]

But unless he's got XP Professional (or higher), I don't think he can run
Virtual PC. Apparently it's not usable with XP Home (according to their
specs).

 

[M.I.5¾]

Thanks. I have no floppy, though I could slap one in from another machine.
Can I slipstream the drivers onto a cd?

If your PC is reasonably new, a USB floppy drive will work fine. And they
aren't expensive either.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

It certainly is usable with XP Home. You don't see anything about whether
VPC runs on XP Home or not in the specs. Look again.

Don't confuse "supported" with "runs". MS Product Support Services does not
support VPC on the home editions of Windows, just the business editions.
But it runs just fine. In fact my wife is in the other room right now
running a Win98SE guest on XP Home on her Compaq laptop.

You see an advisory message when you install VPC if your host OS is
unsupported but after you dismiss the message the software goes ahead and
installs and runs.

 

[Bill in Co.]

OK, point taken, and that's good to know - thanks. So that means (for
example) if you only have WinXP Home on your machine, you can even use VPC
to run something like Win98SE? I presume you have to insert the Win98SE
CD at one of its prompts, and it will install what it needs from that CD
onto another partition (not an NTFS one, but a FAT32 formatted one), and you
won't need the CD after that. (Just curious)

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

In your example Win98 is called the guest and XP Home is the host. VPC sets
up a virtual computer with a virtual hard drive file on the host. The XP
Home host sees this virtual hard drive as just a data file on its NTFS file
system. But the Win98 guest running under VPC thinks it has a real hard
drive formatted FAT32. VPC creates a virtual computer with an emulated
soundcard, video card, mobo, floppy drive, optical drive, hard drive (up to
3), and its own allocation of memory. The real cpu is used (virtualized,
not emulated).

Win98 installs just as it would on any other computer. You put the floppy
in Drive A: and then capture drive A: with the vm's emulated floppy and then
prep the virtual hard drive. Then you launch Setup from the Win98 cd by
capturing the host's cd drive with the vm's emulated one and resetting. All
goes just as it always has to install Win98. Win98 installs and runs in a
window of its own on your XP Home desktop. You can install apps like Office
and Visual Studio (a common use by developers). You can drag and drop files
from your XP desktop onto Win98 one and back, etc. You get the idea.

Now comes the good part. If you have enough ram to spare for such a guest
and have the software, you can create and run a Vista Ultimate x86 guest and
run Vista right on your XP Home desktop. You won't get Aero because the
emulated video card doesn't support it (and you can't change the emulated
hardware) but it is certainly a capable Vista computer running on your XP
computer.

You can set up servers, clients, DOS vm's, run Linux, and have a good old
time learning all kinds of things using VPC (and VMWare and Parallels, of
course).

 

[Plato]

hit F6 when prompted and later in the install it will ask for the drivers,
and it will only look at your floppy drive, nowhere else.

Grin. Floppy drives are still a requirement.

 

[Plato]

You shouldn't need to provide drivers. They are surely in firmware on your
new computer as they have been for a couple of years on all new machines. I

INcorrect.

 

[Bill in Co.]

OK, thanks for all this info, Colin.
I'll have to digest this a bit.

 

[Frank Pajerski]

Only some USB FDD's are supported during WinXP installation .... see
KB916196.

I got a supported IBM (TEAC) USB FDD cheaply and quickly via eBay. This
device worked fine at F6 time when installing WinXP onto a SATA drive, but a
BSOD a few minutes later in the "WinXP Setup" process stopped me. The BSOD
was resolved by then using a customized WinXP install CD with SP2
slipstreamed in. "nLite" http://www.nliteos.com/index.html easily and
correctly produced this CD for an inexperienced me.

--- Frank

 

[FrankFL]

I want to duel boot XP with a machine I bought with Vista pre installed. I
understand that I will need drivers for XP for the SATA drive. Will XP
prompt me for the drivers when I install?

Press the del, f1, f2, esc, or whatever key to go to the CMOS set up to
see if your mother board picked up the SATA drive. If it did, no drivers
are required.