Help: Installing XP onto an SATA drive

Diraan

n00b
Joined
Oct 30, 2004
Messages
24
Here's my situation:

My old IDE drive kicked the bucket a few days ago. I picked up a 150gb SATA Raptor today. I also have a 120gb maxtor SATA drive as well.

I have been trying to install XP onto it but it won't see my hard drive. I also don't have the use of a floppy disc either as my laptop does not have a drive and my desktop PC is dead.

My bios won't auto recognize the new drive. It will only recognize IDE drives. My motherboard is an A7N8X-E Deluxe from Asus.


Any info or help would be appreciated
 
u most likely will need to make a floppy with the drivers on it.. u load it before u get to the setup of windows older motherboards are like that.. my asus K8V deluxe did the same thing
 
Since you don't have a floppy drive, you could build a custom Windows XP disc with the SATA chipset drivers slipstreamed on it.

Check out nliteOS to do this.

Hope that helps.
 
Ive setup the A7N8X Deluxe before without needing a floppy to install onto a Sata.

You sure theres no RAID setup in the bios that is enabled?
The Sata ports should show up as IDE 1 and IDE 2 I believe.
 
The SATA drives don't show up as any IDE drive.

My bios does not have anything that refers to an SATA setup or raid controllers. And windows still does not see any hard drives to install to.
 
great, I finally got a floppy disc and now my USB won't work. None of the ports work.


Why does life hate me so?
 
If you haven't, you'll have to prepare the drive, either using a DOS FDISK or WD utility.

Assumuing you get your USB ports activated (from BIOS - DOS support) you can copy the DOS files to the USB, set the first boot device to external or USB.

Take a few deep breaths at any rate, and prepare yourself for what you need to know all around.

Good luck. :D
 
Checking my manual now.

In Advanced Features, have "Boot Other Device" enabled. And try changing your HDD boot device to SCSI.
 
I've had some weird issues with SATA and XP in the past. The solution for me was to install XP with only one of the SATA drives connected. For some reason teh setup utility insisted I was trying to install to a RAID.
 
Thanks for all the help guys. I finally conviced one of my friends to run over a floppy disc and his laptop (which has a drive).

All is well now. Let me tell you going from a 5400 RPM ATA drive to a 10,000 RPM SATA is quite breath taking.


Again, thanks for the help


Case Closed
 
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