Installing windows xp in an old machine with no sata ports (NO floppy)

[sram]

Hi all. I think this is the best place I should put this. I have an older machine with a mobo that doesn't have sata ports. I have two pata drives running on it and all is well. However, I have this 1st generation raptor drive laying around and I thought I'll just add it to the mix. The raptor is a sata drive. The two drives already in the machine are a 60GB Maxtor drive and a 250GB western digital drive.

As you can tell, the raptor is the fastest of the three and I've got to make it the OS drive and have the other two drives as data drives. The issue is that the mobo doesn't have sata ports. No problem, I went ahead and bought a sata controller which happened to be a raid controller as well. Now, if I want to install windows, setup will not detect the sata controller, hence the raptor drive and I will not be able to install windows into it. That will always be the case unless I have a floppy drive and put the sata controller driver on it and use it while in setup.

NOW, this machine doesn't have a floppy drive, and I actually went ahead and bought one just because of this reason and it turned out to be a bad one! OR maybe there was something wrong with my mobo running it. Anyways, I decided NOT to use a floppy drive. I want to do this some other way, and there got to be one! Man we are in 2009 and we are still relying on floppies?

What are my options?

--Are there controllers which windows xp will recognize naturally? Although I don't want to get another controller.

--I know that there is a way to slipstream the driver into the windows cd, but I don't know how to do it. And I actually don't want to do it if there is an easier way.

--Will installing windows 7 get the controller recognized?

--I don't know if this has anything to do with setting the boot sequence so that no 1 is SCSI and or whatever it shows in the BIOS for controllers.

Please help me folks! It just doesn't feel right using a raptor drive for data where the OS drive is an ancient 7200 rpm drive.


Thanks in advance.

 

[bigdogchris]

Go to the website of the sata/raid controller. They should have drivers that you can download. Afterwords, download nLite. Copy your Win XP disc to a folder, point nlite at that folder, click the button to integrate drivers and you might as well throw SP3 in. Integrate the new iso, burn it and install using that disc. See if that works.

If that doesn't work, I think HP makes a tool that can format a USB drive to look like a floppy in the bios. You could drop the drivers on that then F6 on XP installation boot up.

 

[Catweazle]

First thing I'd do is actually TRY Windows 7 on the rig. It may have drivers for the SATA controller, and if it doesn't then you'd be able to load the drivers from CD or USB anyways. Vista and beyond don't require the drivers to be loaded from floppy disk during installation.


I'd be betting that, irrespective of what you end up doing, you'll end up with the boot loader on the systems priomary PATA drive anyways, so be aware of that. BIOS can't boot an OS from a drive which it can't 'see' as a system boot drive.

 

[GreenMonkey]

You're going to need to slipstream with nLite (which looks intimidating at first but isn't that hard, really).

Alternatively, just install Win7 or Vista and not have to screw with it.

 

[sram]

Thanks for all the replies. I'll try win 7 and see what happens.