WinXP Supports Sata HDDs??

[Super Warrior]

I rebuilt a family's members computer, one being a new motherboard that supports sata drives. They also have WinXP Home edition service pack 2. They recently asked me to upgrade to a new HDD.

I ordered an 80GB WD sata drive from newegg. My question is will XP be able to recognize and install onto a sata drive easily like IDE, or do i need something else to get it to work?

Keep in mind this is the XP SP2(2006), so it should be able to recognize newer hardware i would think.

[Bodyslide]

I would check to make sure that the SATA settings in the Bios are turned on.

[edDV]

XP is fine with SATA. This is more a motherboard driver issue.

[aedipuss]

you may need to load a sata m.b. driver at the beginning of the operating system install for it to find the drive. at some point it pauses and asks if you want to install scsi drivers, press a function key, do it and load whatever came with the board.

you can try without doing it first and if it needs them it will just not find any drive to install to.

[ofbarea]

Or you may use the specific chipsets drivers.

Intel: support.intel.com
Via: www.viaarena.com

[budz]

you may have to load the sata drivers on a floppy first then when asked to load the drivers you can do so.

[ofbarea]

For performance matters, I helped a friend installing W2K in a machine that was running XP SP2 before. It would not allow us installing to SATA, so after downloaded the drivers we installed them and now he running W2K and his machine is faster than ever…

[TBoneit]

Or many Bios settings include a compatability mode that runs the SATA drives as IDE and no drivers are needed. Speed will be reduced as well.