XP Home install on SATA drive.

[Poppa_Meth]

I'm about to put a 6600GT ina a Dell 4600 for my girlfriend's uncle. He want me to do a fresh install of XP Home while I'm at it. I just found out it has a SATA drive which I've never worked with so far. I'm going to slipstream SP2 into his CD and install from there but I'm not sure if I need seperate SATA drivers to access the drive during the installation or not. Any input is appreciated.

[Abbadon]

Hello,

Yes, you need third party drivers to access the SATA drive, in normal circumstances; the motherboard manufacturer supplies these drivers in a floppy.

Now, during installation, Windows will ask you to press certain key to supply the drivers, you will then insert the floppy so that windows can load them and
be able to partition/format it.

P.S.

Certain SATA drives are not bootable, sometimes the only way to find out is to go ahead and do the installation, if possible, check the documentation to avoid headaches.

[glockjs]

make the floppy. pop xp disc in. when the initial screen starts loading press f6. make sure the floppy is in. press s. press enter. and you should be all good.

[waheed]

when i installed xp on the raptor (sata drive) i was never asked for a drivers disk. i do normally the same thing i would do with an ide drive, just format the drive and install windows as normal.

Then again, i could be wrong. but this was also the same case with my other sata drive (seagate). never prompted for a drivers disk, just install like an ide drive.

[Poppa_Meth]

Thats the problem I'm forseeing. I have no way to tell in advance. Some people on the Dell Forums say it installs normally without having to load drivers. So say they have to load drivers during installation to access the drive. None were using a RAID configuration either. I found no diskette with drivers either.

I've also seen a couple threads where people have not loaded drivers but installed just fine. However they used PCPitstop tests and found their drive was performing at 70% below what it should be. As usual Dells reinstallation guide is extremely lacking in information.

[budz]

I know you're asking about XP HOME but I had to extract the SATA DRIVERS from my motherboard cd when I installed WINDOWS 2000 PRO. I'm not sure about XP but you could try to extract the SATA drivers from the XP DISC then copy them to a floppy disc.

Then when installing XP it will ask if you're using third party something then put in that floppy disc to extract the SATA drivers. then follow the prompts. It's basically what glockjs has posted.

[Soopafresh]

It is not so much the drive as it is the SATA controller on the mobo. Look on Dell's site for SATA controllers for that specific mobo. Chances are better than not that XP has the generic drivers to install on the XP Home install CD.

Bottom line, prepare your client of the possible pitfalls before you do anything, so they don't flip out if you run into problems.


Good job doing research BEFORE you do this.

[Poppa_Meth]

That's why I'm doing research. There are no such drivers on Dell's site for this PC. No big surprise really after having dealt with dell for quite a while. I've heard that they may be hidden on the driver CD, which you have to boot from in order to find them, so I'll check that once I get his driver CD from him.

[Marty2003]

If I recall from memory when installing XP it asks you to press F6 to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver. No mention at all of SATA. I've always assumed they would be exactly the same as ATA/IDE drivers and would be built-into the install cd. I've never used the SATA ports on my mobo so I have no real experience with this. It's possibe the people who needed to install SATA drivers were using a SATA RAID setup or they might have been using SATA from a PCI card.

[budz]

You may want to find out what mobo that dell system uses. You may have to set the BIOS to use SATA settings. I know for my ASUS mobo's that is what I had to do in order for me to use a SATA hard drive.

[Poppa_Meth]

yeah I intent to look in the Bios tonight since I'll be back down where the PC is. I'll grab all his discs too since i need to slipstream SP2 for the install anyway. I've heard of people installing just fine without loading 3rd party drivers (when not using a raid array) but I've also heard of problems doing it this way. I just want to be prepared for whatever socks me in the face.

[Poppa_Meth]

Is there any advantage to setting this up as RAID0 instead of no raid configuration? I've heard that there is virtually no performace gain. I believe there is a WD 120GB SATA drive in the PC.

[waheed]

I heard the difference is minimal setting up a RAID0.

[Abbadon]

RAID0 is for backup, data storage at high speed, you would need at least two SATA hard disk to set it up.

[Poppa_Meth]

Not according to the documentation provided with the SATA/RAID drivers. It says RAID0 can be done with one or two drives. I'm not planing to use it anyway since there seems to be no benefit to the setup he has. Thanks for the input.

[ViRaL1]

That's kind of confusing. They MIGHT be talking about the RAID0 connector. On the other hand, if it says you can connect two drives, it's probably a standard ATA controller. SATA connectors are one drive per connection.

[Marty2003]

Since RAID0 only makes a backup copy of a drive I guess it's possible there's a mode in which you can only use half the drive and it uses the rest for backup, Although I've never seen this in practice. In that case is would slow down performance since it would need to write everything to the disk twice.

[Poppa_Meth]

I have no clue. SATA and RAID are things I haven't messed with before. SATA seems to be nothing major, but RAID I have no use for at this point so my education on that can wait

[ViRaL1]

Since RAID0 only makes a backup copy of a drive I guess it's possible there's a mode in which you can only use half the drive and it uses the rest for backup, Although I've never seen this in practice. In that case is would slow down performance since it would need to write everything to the disk twice.

There wouldn't be much of a point to that. If the drive fails, you still lose all your data.

[waheed]

I think you are mistaking Raid0 for Raid1. Raid0 is NOT for backup.

Raid0 requires a minimum of 2 drives.

for more infor see:

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

[glockjs]

raid=2 or more identical drives. and sata is special. im one of the first one's in the game now and and proggys load quicker. and and faster speeds

[Poppa_Meth]

I'm just going by the driver documentation. I'd definitely look into it more in depth if I wanted to use it since the docs seems to be entirely wrong according to what everyone is telling me.