Where to get SATA drivers if this is only drive in PC

[Martin C]

I have seen a few posts recently in a number of newsgroups that show how to
add a SATA drive to an existing system and after WinXP is already present.
What I will shortly have is a system with the following:

ASUS A8N5X motherboard,
Seagate Barracuda 200GB Sata II drive.

I have looked on the motherboard CD for what could be the SATA drivers that
I will need to have copied to floppy disc, but there is nothing I could find
that was obviously what I wanted. I found SATA RAID controller software, but
that is many MB in size.

From reading the motherboard manual, it would appear that the BIOS *should*
detect the presence of the SATA disc. Does this mean that I will not then
need the drivers on the floppy disc, or is that something that I will have
to add at a later date, once I have installed WinXP Home on the disc?

I have tried Google with numerous combinations of SATA, Driver, Silicon
Graphics, ASUS, A8N5X but have not really had much joy so far.

In a nut shell: how the hell to I get hold of the drivers; when do I press
F6 to install them (before or after WinXP installation); do I need the
drivers at all?

Thanks for any help. I am beginning to wish that I had just bought a bog
standard PATA drive. They seem to be so much easier.

Martin

PS: sorry for the cross post, but I had hoped to start getting all the PC
bits together this weekend, so I am hoping to maximise my chances of getting
a response that can sort it all out for me.

 

[JAD]

windows xp sp2? start the machine from the XP disc and install
no SP2? floppy that came with the maiboard or from the asus site

 

[Bob Knowlden]

I have never used an A8N5X, but I expect that it's the same as an A8N-SLI:
no drivers are necessary to install XP on a SATA drive that is not part of a
RAID array. (You'd want to install the nVidia chipset and other drivers
afterwards, of course.) The SATA drives have to not be configured as for
RAID in the BIOS Advanced menu, NVRAID area.

If you are setting up a RAID array, you'll need to run the utility that
comes with the mainboard CD to create a floppy with the drivers. (I'm a
little surprised that there's no downloadable SATA floppy set at
support.asus.com for your board. You can find the drivers if you unzip the
chipset driver package, though. (I've done that with the latest chipset
drivers from www.nvidia.com for the nForce 4, version 6.70.) The real trick
would be installing the RAID drivers without a floppy drive; I've never done
it.

Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Bob Davis]

I have seen a few posts recently in a number of newsgroups that show how to
add a SATA drive to an existing system and after WinXP is already present.
What I will shortly have is a system with the following:

ASUS A8N5X motherboard,
Seagate Barracuda 200GB Sata II drive.

I have looked on the motherboard CD for what could be the SATA drivers
that
I will need to have copied to floppy disc, but there is nothing I could
find
that was obviously what I wanted. I found SATA RAID controller software,
but
that is many MB in size.

From reading the motherboard manual, it would appear that the BIOS
*should*
detect the presence of the SATA disc. Does this mean that I will not then
need the drivers on the floppy disc, or is that something that I will have
to add at a later date, once I have installed WinXP Home on the disc?

I have tried Google with numerous combinations of SATA, Driver, Silicon
Graphics, ASUS, A8N5X but have not really had much joy so far.

In a nut shell: how the hell to I get hold of the drivers; when do I press
F6 to install them (before or after WinXP installation); do I need the
drivers at all?

Thanks for any help. I am beginning to wish that I had just bought a bog
standard PATA drive. They seem to be so much easier.

There should be a way to install the SATA RAID drivers from the motherboard
install disk. Also, if you enable the controller in the bios it should see
the SATA drive, but I would install the controller first, then worry about
the disk.

I have installed on-chip and on-board RAID controllers from Intel (ICH5R),
Silicon Image (Sil3112), and Highpoint, and in each case Win9x or XP found
the new hardware after it was enabled in the bios. After doing this and
booting into XP, try inserting the motherboard install disk and select the
driver to install from the list, as I assume it has a menu where you can
select what to install. You'll need to reboot again for it to be shown as
"working properly" in Device Manager. Until then you will likely see a
yellow "?" showing this device.

After XP shows the controller under "SATA and RAID controllers" in Device
Manager, you should be able to shut down, connect the drive, and have it
recognized in Disk Management after booting into XP. Note that until it is
partitioned and formatted it will not be seen in Windows Explorer.

 

[Ed Medlin]

I have seen a few posts recently in a number of newsgroups that show how to
add a SATA drive to an existing system and after WinXP is already present.
What I will shortly have is a system with the following:

ASUS A8N5X motherboard,
Seagate Barracuda 200GB Sata II drive.

I have looked on the motherboard CD for what could be the SATA drivers
that
I will need to have copied to floppy disc, but there is nothing I could
find
that was obviously what I wanted. I found SATA RAID controller software,
but
that is many MB in size.

From reading the motherboard manual, it would appear that the BIOS
*should*
detect the presence of the SATA disc. Does this mean that I will not then
need the drivers on the floppy disc, or is that something that I will have
to add at a later date, once I have installed WinXP Home on the disc?

I have tried Google with numerous combinations of SATA, Driver, Silicon
Graphics, ASUS, A8N5X but have not really had much joy so far.

In a nut shell: how the hell to I get hold of the drivers; when do I press
F6 to install them (before or after WinXP installation); do I need the
drivers at all?

Thanks for any help. I am beginning to wish that I had just bought a bog
standard PATA drive. They seem to be so much easier.

Martin

PS: sorry for the cross post, but I had hoped to start getting all the PC
bits together this weekend, so I am hoping to maximise my chances of
getting
a response that can sort it all out for me.

In your bios you should have settings for your SATA controller......i.e.,
Raid or Standard EIDE or IDE (or something similiar depending on the bios).
Set it to IDE and it should be recognized just like an IDE drive. On my
particular MB, the default setting was Raid and I had to change it because I
wanted 4 individual SATA drives rather than a Raid array on this system. It
may be listed under the name of the particular controller....Mine was an
ICH5R (Intel). Good luck.

Ed

 

[Guest]

Having just installed a brand new system with this motherboard and
using an XP SP1 CD, I can state that if you are attempting to install a
new copy of Windows onto a new SATA drive, that you do need to install
the SATA drivers from a floppy (and it absolutely must be floppy*)
during Windows installation.

I also wasn't sure which driver was correct from the ASUS CD as they do
not differentiate between them well. My solution was to create 4
different floppies, each with one set of what might have potentially
have been the correct driver (What else do you have to do with old
floppy discs anyway?).

The BIOS will recognize the SATA drive without the drivers, but Windows
will not. Therefore, you can boot using the Windows CD, but watch for
the the message that says "Press <fX> to install other drivers" (where
X is a number I don't remember(might be 8) and the text is only
approximate).

Windows will continue loading all normal drivers and then ask you for a
floppy with the extra drivers you wish to install. I just cycled
through my four disks until I found the one that Windows felt
comfortable with. From there the install is normal and Windows will
not need this again once installation is complete.

*There are ways to make an CD that has the SATA driver and Windows
install files together, but you'll have to google for it if you want to
try that. I decided it looked like more trouble than it was worth.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

*There are ways to make an CD that has the SATA driver and
Windows install files together, but you'll have to google for it if
you want to try that. I decided it looked like more trouble than
it was worth.

It's called "slipstreaming" and it can be worthwhile if you
intend to re-install Windows again maybe a couple times
in the future. Most people have been doing it to add
SP2 to their Windows XP installation CD, it can be done
to add SATA drivers as well.

Here's background on slipstreaming WinXP with SP2:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1626&page=1
http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm

Googling using "slipstream SATA drivers" will get you lots
of hits for slipstreaming SATA drivers with the files in the
WinXP installation CD.

Also google "autostreamer" for a free utility that eases
the slipstreaming process.

*TimDaniels*