Where are the hard disk drivers?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anthony Buckland
  • Start date Start date
A

Anthony Buckland

I'm trying to locate all the drivers for my hard drive. I get somewhat
lost in the terminology of the Device Manager. What hardware items
relate to the hard drive (in WinXP Media Center Edition, if that makes
a difference). Thanks for any help, after years I remain a newbie in the
hardware configuration world.
 
If it matters, I'm trying to construct a BartPe CD, and want to make
sure I have all the drivers needed to recognize and use my hard
drive and its partitions.
 
Anthony Buckland said:
If it matters, I'm trying to construct a BartPe CD, and want to make
sure I have all the drivers needed to recognize and use my hard
drive and its partitions.
Click to expand...

You probably need no drivers for this purpose.

You can test by booting with your XP CD, and going into Setup, towards a new
install. If you need drivers for the hard disk (and this will only be with
some SATA motherboards), you won't get to the point where you are asked
*where* to install to - instead, you'll get a message saying that there are
no hard disks detected. At either point, cancel the install.

Even if you get that message, you can install. In the BIOS, there will be
a setting to put the hard disk controller in AHCI or a "legacy" mode. Only
AHCI will need drivers. In legacy mode, the drives will be detected, but
will be very very slightly less responsive.

HTH
-pk
 
it would have been better to have stated that in your first post, we are not
mind readers.
Sata drivers are usually supplied by the motherboard maker on a CD with
instructions on how to create the floppy necessary, so check those
instructions with the new MB
 
You will need drivers for the controller card if it is an add-on card (PCI
or PCIe). My installation doesn't recognise the hard drives until after
windows is installed on the SATA drive that is connected to the motherboard
AND the drivers are loaded for the PCI card even though these hard drives
are IDE. However, if all you have is a single (or 2) hard drive(s) then you
should be fine.
 
sgopus said:
what makes you think you need them?
if the hd is working and your pc is working??
Click to expand...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

And then I made a somewhat snippy response, for which I
apologize; and then my power supply went south and my
machine had to get shipped off, since I was still on extended
warranty; and then I got into a health issue which consumed
a lot of time. Hence, a lot of time has gone by, and people
would be justified thinking I'd gotten inattentive/rude. Meantime
(and for some reason I had to go off to IE to get this stuff):

Patrick Keenan wrote, on Nov. 2:

You probably need no drivers for this purpose.

You can test by booting with your XP CD, and going into Setup, towards a new
install. If you need drivers for the hard disk (and this will only be with
some SATA motherboards), you won't get to the point where you are asked
*where* to install to - instead, you'll get a message saying that there are
no hard disks detected. At either point, cancel the install.

Even if you get that message, you can install. In the BIOS, there will be
a setting to put the hard disk controller in AHCI or a "legacy" mode. Only
AHCI will need drivers. In legacy mode, the drives will be detected, but
will be very very slightly less responsive.

--------------------------------------------

sgopus wrote, on Nov. 2:

it would have been better to have stated that in your first post, we are not
mind readers.
Sata drivers are usually supplied by the motherboard maker on a CD with
instructions on how to create the floppy necessary, so check those
instructions with the new MB

Anthony Buckland said:
If it matters, I'm trying to construct a BartPe CD, and want to make
sure I have all the drivers needed to recognize and use my hard
drive and its partitions.
Click to expand...

---------------------------------------------

Jason wrote, on Nov. 2:

You will need drivers for the controller card if it is an add-on card (PCI
or PCIe). My installation doesn't recognise the hard drives until after
windows is installed on the SATA drive that is connected to the motherboard
AND the drivers are loaded for the PCI card even though these hard drives
are IDE. However, if all you have is a single (or 2) hard drive(s) then you
should be fine.

==========================================================

Thanks for the rest of the responses, and now I'll be able to get back to
work. I'll post aqain when I have something to report.
 
Okay, back to work.

The issue of finding my hard disk drivers arose when I tried
installing Acronis True Image Home 2009, a major new version.
I found that the rescue media I created wouldn't work, a big
problem when the object is to be able to restore the C:
partition to, say, a replacement drive. The outcome of my
interchange with the MVP equivalents on the Acronis forum
was that I needed to construct a BartPE CD. (Why, because
of the forum advice that

"TI 2009 uses a different Linux kernel and different drivers
than TI 9. Most likely, the drivers for your system are not
correct or not included.")

After learning how, I made a BartPE CD. That done, I could
boot and load the Acronis program from the CD, but it couldn't
find my hard drive to restore to, although it could find various
other objects such as DVD drives, card reader/writers and
a USB external drive (with the image on it). The final piece
of advice I got from the forum was

"If BartPE can't find your drives, you most likely just need
to add the necessary drivers to your build."

After naive attempts to find them myself (I'm mostly a software
person), I came here. I've tried what seemed to me to be
the obvious thing, incorporating into my BartPE build the
drivers that the Device Manager associates with Volume 0,
which as far as I can tell is my hard drive (I can't find any other
candidates with DM). No joy, no hard disk can be found when
True Image is loaded from the BartPE CD.

(I've recovered from all my BartPE experiments, by the way,
by using a True Image 9 CD to restore from my pre-experiment
save. A suggestion to other users: always have a fresh external
image and a bootable CD for your current True Image version
before you install a new version. People have regretted not
preparing in this way.)

Hence my initial question, which I admit I could have fleshed
out with the background to my problem. Is there somewhere
else, such as somewhere in the registry, I should be looking?
Has anyone had analogous problems with finding the main hard
drive when booting from a self-contained CD?

Thanks for any pointers. Happy Thanksgiving.
 
Are you by any chance using Vista and attempting to see SATA drives from
your boot CD and not finding any? If so then you will need special drives
because your SATA drive are in a special mode just for Vista. You would have
to change the mode for XP or some other OS to see the drive unless the
proper drives are loaded. Note that changing the mode of the drive you could
access to the data on it.

--
Randem Systems
Your Installation Specialist
The Top Inno Setup Script Generator
http://www.randem.com/innoscript.html
http://www.rndem.com/installerproblems.html
http://www.randem.com/vistainstalls.html
http://www.financialtrainingservices.org
 
Randem said:
Are you by any chance using Vista and attempting to see SATA drives from
your boot CD and not finding any? If so then you will need special drives
because your SATA drive are in a special mode just for Vista. You would
have to change the mode for XP or some other OS to see the drive unless
the proper drives are loaded. Note that changing the mode of the drive you
could access to the data on it.
Click to expand...
...

Thanks, but no (i.e. I'm not using Vista). I have WinXP
Media Center Edition. My C: partition is NTFS. Also
resident on the drive are a small EISA configuration
partition, also NTFS, and an Acronis Secure Zone (part
of using Acronis True Image, currently version 9),
which is FAT32. A Secure Zone holds images (as many
as will fit, in my case currently just one) of one's C: or
other partitions to facilitate restoring when the disk drive
is still intact. The new version (2009 Home) of ATI I was
attempting to install has no problem installing in my NTFS
partition, saving to an external USB drive or verifying that
saved image. The problem arises only when using 2009
ATI's rescue CD or any of my attempts so far to create
and use a BartPE CD -- neither variety of CD can find
my (single) hard drive. You'll appreciate that installing
a new ATI can't be considered a success when it can
only save, not restore.
 
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