Windows XP install on Sata hard drive

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loxety

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2006
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I have a pata drive but am thinking of getting one of those 750GB seagates with the sata connectors on it. I had heard about installing windows xp on a sata drive was a pain in the butt because of the lack of drivers for the sata controller, or has this changed? The install disk I have is a very recent version of windows xp home with sp2. Will there be drivers on the CD for my P5W DH sata controllers? Will I need to get a old floppy disk drive from ebay or would a usb floppy work?
 
For this reason alone I still have a floppy drive lying around the house. I think I heard with Vista you can use USB but as far as my experiences with XP pro SP2 you will need a normal floppy drive.
 
Depends upon whether or not the SATA controller on you mobo is a native omplementation. If it is then BIOS setup will make the drive available to the XP installation routine, and you'll be able to install XP just as you would to an IDE drive. If not you'd need to load the driver during the Windows setup.

I'd suspect your recent mobo will be fine. I'll leave it up to others who have experience with that board to provide a definitive answer, but I suspect the only thing you might need to do to have the drive accessible to the Windows setup would be to connect it to a specific sata connector (usually the first numbered one).
 
The last time I had an issue with having to load a SATA controller driver in order to load XP on a SATA drive was back when I had a K8N Neo Platinum 754 board.. every motherboard I've had past that worked fine installing on a SATA hard drive without drivers.
 
If that board has an Intel chipset, you won't need to do anything differently.
 
djnes said:
If that board has an Intel chipset, you won't need to do anything differently.
Click to expand...
Exactly. The Intel chipsets (at least) have an option in the BIOS to have the SATA ports answer as Legacy IDE devices which I *think* is the default setting. I don't know about other chipsets, but all my Intel chipset-based systems with SATA, including my 3-year old 875, have installed on SATA drives with no issues at all, and no extra drivers needed. My most recent P965 system even installed XP64 from an SATA DVD-ROM drive onto an SATA hard drive with zero issues and again no extra drivers needed.
 
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