Install WinXP on SATA HD on A7N8X-E Deluxe?

Bendit

Install WinXP on SATA HD on A7N8X-E Deluxe(nForce2)?

Somebody here must have done this process.

How did you install WinXP from scratch on your SATA hard drive?

What kind of SATA drivers, if any, did you use at install time?

What kind of BIOS settings did you use?

I am creating this post because my other post is becoming confusing.

Hopefully somebody has some info about this process. Thanks and Cheers!

Locust76

You have to put your SATA drivers on a floppy disk and load them at windows setup boot with the F6 key.

There should be a utility to do so on your motherboard CD.

Bendit

Locust76, thanks for the info.

Can you confirm this? Have you done exactly that? Thanks again for any info. Cheers!

EDIT: I am asking because I did not find such utility on my nForce2 mobo CD. The only SATA utility on there is a Raid monitor (just tried to install it and run it).

Bendit

Crap. I read somewhere else that I have to browse the mobo CD and manually copy the driver files on a floppy.

Manually!

:roll:

Locust76

I can confirm this, it's exactly what I did when I set up my current system.


Good luck

Bendit

Roger that.

Hey, while I am at it.

Let me ask you a question, perhaps you can confirm what I am thinking.

I am already using that new SATA drive in Windows in non-bootable mode. I just use it for storage and it's already NTFS.

If I am successful in making Windows XP see my drive, I should be able to just install windows on that drive without having to reformat it or repartition it, right? (as in use it as is, with its current 100% allocated partition and all)

Therefore keep the files already on that HD (music, pics etc.), just add WinXP on it and make it bootable.

Do you agree?

Lep

If you have sp2 slipstreamed onto your winxp install disk it should already have SATA drivers on it.

Bendit

Lep wrote:

If you have sp2 slipstreamed onto your winxp install disk it should already have SATA drivers on it.

Yes, I do have WinXP SP2 slipstreamed (latest .ISO from Microsoft even!).

But unfortunately, it is not recognizing my onboard SATA controller and I am forced to mess with floppy disk crap.

vonPoonBurGer

Bendit wrote:

If I am successful in making Windows XP see my drive, I should be able to just install windows on that drive without having to reformat it or repartition it, right? (as in use it as is, with its current 100% allocated partition and all)

If you're already got a working Windows install, one that can see the SATA drive, what you could do is copy the drive image from the old drive to the SATA drive. Then, disconnect the original drive and boot off the SATA drive. The imaged copy of Windows should have the correct drivers already, not to mention all your apps, files, etc. Since the original IDE drive is disconnected, it's pretty risk-free. I usually use PartitionMagic for partition copying, but I'm sure there are free equivalents available. If it doesn't work, you can just wipe out the SATA drive and go with the original floppy disk plan.

Speaking of which, if you can't find your motherboard CD, you can download it from the ASUS website. It's included in the SATA driver package, you just need to copy a half-dozen files to a floppy (the .cat, .ini, .vxd, .sys and .cpl files in the package, along with txtsetup.oem).

As for slipstreaming the driver, I don't think that'll work. No matter what you've got slipstreamed, the Windows installer only loads certain drivers. To have it load additional drivers, the only option I'm aware of is to press F6 when prompted, and the only location it will load additional drivers from is A:. Even if the slip-streamed files include a SATA driver, you need that driver to access the drive itself long before the installer will even touch the installation files on the disc. I find it absolutely mind-boggling that this is still the case, the blue-screen text-based Windows installer has been this way since the days of NT. But that's just how it is.

Locust76

Imaging your boot drive to your SATA drive will erase all existing data on the SATA drive, though.

Windows setup is flexible as to how you can set up the boot drive; it gives you the option to create and delete partitions of any size, as well as installing into existing partitions (keeping your data).

Unless you've got Vista, the only way to do this is through the floppy. XP SP2 has SATA drivers, but it might not have compatible ones.

Bendit

sweet mother of all good beer.

I am getting the "clicks of death".

my new hard drive is already going bad.

after reading reviews, I just cannot trust OEM SATA hard drives.

it's horrible!

robaal

Ironically, OEM drives usually have a longer warranty.

Are you also sure it's not just regular seeking noise? Seagate (and supposedly Samsung and new WDs) have very quiet seeking noises - barely audible. In contrast Maxtor drives make a lot of noise while seeking.

So maybe you had a very quiet drive until now and got a noisy one? It shouldn't be hard to tell, as seeking occurs only when reading (non-sequential) data while I believe the clicks are more random.


HDtune has a speed test, at end of which you get a seek-time test in case you'd like to hear it.

Bendit

robaal, na.

it's the terrible clicks of death. WinXP hangs for a while when it happens.

it's prolly a bad controller on the hard drive.

I did use HDtune and did see what my new drive had 8k in bad sectors.

even though it's only 8k, it's a new hard drive so all of those things put together made me return the drive.

now, newegg.com wants to charge me a restocking fee for returning a bad drive? I don't think so.

robaal

You can try returning it directly to the manufacturer.